"Filling Station" is a poem by the twentieth-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. First published in her 1965 collection Questions of Travel, the work mines questions of love, kinship, and connection. It takes place at a filling station (i.e. a gas station) in an unknown location. The poem's unidentified speaker initially responds to their surroundings with horror and disgust, noting that the station is dirty and that its inhabitants are uncouth. Over the course of the work, the speaker begins to observe evocative, unexpected details that hint at the love and beauty contained in this unlikely location—for instance, skillfully embroidered doilies and a well-maintained begonia plant. These details prompt the speaker to experience an epiphany, becoming transcendently aware of the love that surrounds her.
Like many of Bishop's best-known works, "Filling Station" conveys a moment of intense emotional revelation through understated, lightly ironic language. Bishop uses sparing, subtle details to depict the speaker's emotional evolution. In terms of sound elements, the poem opts again for subtlety—using a similar number of stresses in each line, and using stanzas of similar length, but without a regular rhyme scheme, meter, or stanza type.
