Filling Station Literary Elements

An unnamed, unidentified traveler

Six stanzas of 6-7 lines each, without a regular meter or rhyme scheme

The poem uses metaphor in subtle ways. The phrase "oil-soaked" uses metaphor to exaggerate the amount of oil at the station. The phrase "cuts him under the arms" metaphorically links the lines of a suit's seams to cuts. Finally, the phrase "grease-impregnated wickerwork" uses pregnancy as a metaphor to convey the fact that the furniture contains or has expanded from grease.

Assonance appears in the phrases "that match," "cuts him under," and "embroidered the doily."
Alliteration appears in the phrases "family filling station," "dirty dog," and "softly say."
The phrase "big dim doily" contains both, with I sounds in "big" and "dim" producing assonance, and D sounds in "dim" and "doily" producing alliteration.

Bishop plays with both situational and dramatic irony here. She reveals the filling station to be a place of rootedness, domesticity, and love, though readers are likely to characterize such a place as utilitarian or uninteresting. At the same time, she suggests early on that her own speaker is blinded by anxiety and judgment, giving readers the distance of dramatic irony from that speaker.

Lyric poem

A filling station in an unknown location

Early in the work, the poem's tone is tense, anxious, and disgusted. Later, it becomes curious, observant, and plaintive.

The poem's protagonist is the speaker, and the speaker's own fear and incuriosity are antagonists.

The poem's primary conflict is an internal one within the speaker: she is torn between her instinctive initial impression of the filling station as unappealing, uninteresting, and unworthy, and her subsequent urge to humanize the family running it.

The poem's climax comes when the speaker's curiosity peaks and she wonders "Why the extraneous plant?/Why the taboret?/Why, oh why, the doily?"

The sentence "(it’s a family filling station)," placed dismissively in parentheses, foreshadows the speaker's later, fuller exploration of the bonds between the filling station's owners.

In general, Elizabeth Bishop is known for her understated explorations of emotion. Here, the speaker's epiphany emerges in subtle observations—of a begonia plant, or of oil cans arranged in a row—all contributing to an understated, yet momentous, emotional shift.

The poem alludes to Esso, a brand name for the oil company ExxonMobil

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The poem identifies a begonia as "hirsute," refers to furniture as "impregnated," and calls cars "high-strung." This heavy use of personification clues readers into the speaker's growing empathy: she increasingly sees the station and the objects in it as feeling, living things.

The otherwise understated poem ends on the hyperbolic line "Somebody loves us all." The description "Some comic books provide/the only note of color—" is hyperbolic, but the speaker immediately qualifies it with the clarification "of certain color."

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