![]() The poet finds little comforts of a home, with contrasting nuances to describe a ‘cement porch’ which lay ‘behind the pumps’ as there is a parallel between work and home. ![]() The third stanza produces a hint of transgression from the critical point of view by taking a peep into their personal life with the first discovery of an item of relaxation – though grease-impregnated, a place for it, the porch, simple items of entertainment, suggesting presence of children, pet and family employed by Bishop as she looks for clues of their livelihood, established by the rhetorical question, ‘Do they live in the station?’. The sons are equally connoted with dirt and filth, where Bishop uses assonance of ‘quick’ ‘saucy’ and ‘greasy’ to attribute the sons, and characterise that it was a ‘family filling station’ which is all ‘thoroughly dirty’. When Bishop observes closely as to how the father’s dress ‘cuts him under the arms’ we find an underpinned picture of the poor and poverty-struck, the ones that we don’t take seriously, having to do hard work and manual labour to survive in society. She again uses the connotation associated with ‘oil-soaked’ in the clothing of the father, who is also ‘dirty’. These morbid illustrations are reflected not only in the setting, but within the habitants of the setting as well, from the father to his sons, Bishop points out the complete absence of beauty of their work life. Bishop is very careful with her diction as she calls the whole scene ‘disturbing’ and even presents wariness of the setting with the last line of her first stanza, ‘Be careful with that match!’ which evokes a sense of fearful cautiousness in the scene along with the colour ‘black’ as it is normally symbolised with signs of danger. The use of connotations highlight the key illustrations made by Bishop, where the very introduction of the filling station is that of dirt and filth which is supplemented with the repetition of the word ‘oil’ in ‘oil-soaked’ and ‘oil-permeated’.
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