"Filling Station" by Elizabeth Bishop and "The Jailer" by Sylvia Plath - Analysis and Comparison of Styles

1.Elizabeth Bishop - "Filling Station"
The poem consists of seven stanzas. Most of them have six or seven verses, except the very last one, which contains only two.
The first stanza, with a strong exclamation in the beginning verse, introduces the setting - a small, dirty gas station. There is a clearly visible intention of creating some kind of repulsion through the description, as everything is "dirty" and "oil-soaked" - a good example of Objective Correlative, a device frequently used by Bishop. In the second stanza, a family (a father and his sons) is introduced. They are, too, "oil-soaked" and "dirty". The third stanza states the question: "Do they live in the station?", and tries to answer it (there is a porch behind the pumps, a dog - dirty, of course - is lying on sofa). A further proof of the fact that the family lives there appears in the fourth stanza: there are some comic books lying on the taboret (they provide the frist coloured accent in the poem).…