Answer to Question 1
- Both lines stand late in their poems and sound similar; both express the speakers glimpse of beautyor at least, in Filling Station, the only beauty the people can muster and the poet can perceive.
Helen Vendler, discussing the poem in
Part of Nature, Part of Us (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980), takes the closing statement to mean God loves us all. But Irvin Ehrenpreis disagrees: The SOSOSO of overlapping labels on stacked cans is supposed to comfort automobiles as if they were high-strung horses, i.e., like a mother, not a god. Doily and begonia indicate that some absent woman has tried to brighten up this gas station for her husband and her sons (review of Vendlers book in
New York Review of Books, 29 Apr. 1980).
Edward Cifelli, County College of Morris, passes along an insight from his student Joseph Grana. The message ESSOSOSOSO may be an SOS from the same somebody who embroidered the doily and waters the plant. Professor Cifelli adds, The pitiable woman who tries to put traces of beauty into a filthy filling station is unconsciously calling out for help, for rescue. Now
that engages me
Robert Pinsky has also written of Filling Station with high esteem. He calls the poem a kind of contest between the meticulous vigor of the writer and the sloppy vigor of the family, both filling a dull moment and scene with an unexpected, crazy, deceptively off-hand kind of elegance or ornament. He particularly admires the poets choice of modifiersincluding the direct, honest-seeming
dirty. Adjectives, he notes, according to a sound rule of thumb for writing classes, do not make good descriptions. By writing almost as though she were too plain and straightforward to have heard of such a rule, Bishop loads characterizations of herself and her subject into the
comfy dog, the
dim doily, the
hirsute begonia; the quietest possible virtuoso strokes (
The Situation of Poetry Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976 7577).
Ive sometimes thought Filling Station would make a good exercise for acting students, observes critic and teacher David Walker, given the number of different ways the first lineand much of the restmight be stressed. Is the opening exclamation solemn and childlike, or prissy and fastidious, or enthusiastic? All we can identify with certainty, I think, is the quality of fascination, the intent gaze on the filling stations pure oiliness. Walker is reminded of Frosts Design in that both poets seek to discover a meaningful pattern in apparently random detailsbut while Frost points toward a sinister architecture in what he observes, Bishop finds beauty and harmony (Elizabeth Bishop and the Ordinary,
Field Fall 1984).
Brad Leithauser has admired the poems ingenious sound effects. At its end, the cans of oil are arranged like cue cards to prompt that concluding sentence, the SO SOSO grading toward that Somebody loves us all. Neatly, the message in the oil cans is reinforced by both the so and the softly in the fourth line from the end (The Complete Elizabeth Bishop,
New Criterion Mar. 1983: 38).
Answer to Question 2
- Anybody who ever abused a donkey, or who thinks donkeys contemptible.
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