Summary
The speaker's environment, a filling station, is dirty and so covered in oil that it seems coated in a semitransparent black layer. The speaker instructs a listener to be careful with a match, in case the place catches fire. The father of the family who runs the filling station is wearing an ill-fitting and dirty uniform. He has a few sons, crude in their movements, who help him. They, like their father, wear dirty and oily clothes. The speaker wonders whether the family lives at the filling station. Behind the gas pumps, the station has a cement porch with wicker furniture on it, also dirty and greasy. A dog is sitting on the sofa.
Analysis
This poem begins with the speaker in a position of defensiveness. They perceive the filling station and the family running it as unpleasant, and indeed as threatening. This is discernible in the literal content of what the speaker says—their observations are unflattering, focusing on the uncleanliness of the physical space. Through stylistic choices concerning diction, syntax, and sound elements, Elizabeth Bishop further demonstrates her speaker's scorn for the filling station and anxiety about existing in it.
Repetition plays an important role in conveying the speaker's horror and inability to look beyond the filling station's unappealing surface. The speaker uses the words (or variants of the words) "dirty," "greasy," and "oil" multiple times. Generally, poets aim for variety in their vocabulary, limiting uses of any single word. In doing the opposite, Bishop arguably reduces the visual vividness of her poem—again, running counter to most writers' goals of sensory vividness. But, because this poem's speaker has a closed-off, incurious attitude about the filling station at the start of the poem, it's reasonable that they would not describe it in a visually detailed manner. Their very perception appears to be limited, constrained by their own lack of interest.
Meanwhile, the first staza of the poem is marked by simple sentences—especially imperative or exclamatory ones. The work's first line is "Oh, but it is dirty!"—not only employing the repetition of the word "dirty," but also doing so in the context of a forceful, almost aggressive sentence structure. Moreover, one-syllable words with harsh T and B consonants make up most of the sentence, intensifying the sense of the speaker's forceful disapproval. At the same time, the word "Oh" has a plaintive quality, and consists of an open vowel sound. This word is reminiscent of a moan or cry, suggesting that the speaker feels some degree of fear at the unfamiliar filling station in addition to mere dislike. The first stanza concludes with the sentence "Be careful with that match!" With this imperative, the speaker's defensiveness becomes more explicit—they literally defend themselves against the perceived danger of the station. They also aim to control their environment through instructing others harshly, again demonstrating a lack of desire to engage with the filling station. Yet, again, the line hints at a real uncertainty in spite of its uncompromising tone: the speaker feels unsafe at the filling station.
At a few moments, suggestions of a softening in the speaker's attitude emerge. The line "(it’s a family filling station)" emphasizes the human relationships between the filling station's owners. This is a lightly sympathetic observation, or at least a neutral one, though it is hemmed in by parentheses, as if the speaker is unwilling to cede too much of their defensive stance. Similarly, the line "Do they live in the station?" is phrased as a question, suggesting curiosity. The line "a dirty dog, quite comfy" contains two adjectives, one negative and judgmental, the other relatively positive. In other words, as the poem goes on, the speaker becomes ever-so-slightly more interested in and less judgmental about the filling station.
