Elizabeth Bishop And Her Poem filling Station Essay example -- essay

Elizabeth Bishop and Her Poem "Filling Station"Elizabeth Bishops skill as a poet can be clearly seen in the thought-provoking poem entitled Filling Station. She paints the different lecturelevels of poetry with the skill of an artist-- she seems to have an eye for circumstance as she contrasts the dark and dim reference of a cream station to amore homey, pleasant atmosphere. Bishop aptly arranges her words andexpressions through the language devices of vocalisation and metaphor.     In Filling Station, Bishop uses t oneness of voice brilliantly, through theuse of phonetics, to create the poems initial atmosphere. The opening seems tobe offering a straightforward description of the filling station "Oh, but itis dirty/ -this little filling station,/ petroleum-soaked, oil-permeated/ to adisturbing, over-all/ black translucency". A closer inspection of the exculpateagereveals quite a opthalmic oil-soaked picture. This is created in large part by theoily sounds themselves. When spoken out-loud the diphthong oi in oil createsa diffusion of sound around the mouth that physically spreads the oil soundaround the passage. An interesting seepage can also be clearly seen whenlooking specifically at the words "oil-soaked", "oil-permeated" and " cover-impregnated". These words connect the oi in oily with the word following itand heighten the spreading of the sound. Moreover, when studying the oiatmosphere throughout the poem the oi in doyley and embroidered seems toparticularly stand out. The oozing of the grease in the filling station movesto each new stanza with the mention of these words In the fourth stanza, "bigdim doily", to the second last stanza, "why, oh why, the doily? /Embroidered"to the last stanza, "somebody embroidered the doily".     Whereas the oi sound created an oily sound of language throughout thepoem, the repetitive ow sound achieves a very diff erent syntactical feature.The cans which "gently say /ESSO--SO--SO--SO" create a wind-like blowingeffect from the mouth. Each SO allows for a sort of visual metaphor to beseen-- cars or the personified " bumpy automobiles" as they pass on by.Not only are oi and ow sounds effectively used in this poem to create aunique tone but so is th... ...can be that small part in us that stillsearches for hope and normalcy. We each need a "comfy" filling station. Andalthough judgmental onlookers, or as Bishop writes the "high-strung automobiles",may only want to see the dirtiness of an individual character, a family orsituation, they need to realize that if they look deep enough, light will shiningthrough. "Somebody loves us all" if we are only to give the thought and time.Afterall, even an automobile needs oil every once in a while to continue downits path.     In conclusion, it can be clearly seen that Elizabeth Bishop in the poemFi lling Station has wonderfully played with different levels of language likevoice and metaphor. The reader becomes actively involved in questioning theirown filling station and the care they give toward it. Is he or she the station,one who drives by the station or one who gives to the station?BibliographyBishop, Elizabeth. "Filling Station." An Introduction to Poetry. Eds. DanaGioia and      X.J. Kennedy. Eighth Edition. New York HarperCollins CollegePublishers,      1994.