Do you find any similarity between “ESSO—SO—SO—SO” in “FillingStation” and “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” in “The Fish”?
What will be an ideal response?
- Both lines stand late in their poems and sound similar; both express the speaker’s glimpse of beauty—or 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 ‘—SO—SO—SO’ 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 Vendler’s 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 “ESSO—SO—SO—SO” 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 poet’s choice of modifiers—including 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] 75–77).
“I’ve 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 line—and much of the rest—might 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 station’s pure oiliness.” Walker is reminded of Frost’s “Design” in that both poets seek to discover “a meaningful pattern in apparently random details”—but 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 poem’s ingenious sound effects. At its end, “the cans of oil are arranged like cue cards to prompt that concluding sentence, the SO— SO—SO 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).
Language Arts & World Languages
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