David has kindly offered to lead discussion of these poems by Elizabeth Bishop (and one by Wordsworth)
Filling Station
The Fish
My Heart Leaps Up (Wordsworth)
In The Waiting Room
One Art
What a program of poems... it does not surprise me that in the hour and a half, only Filling Station was discussed, and The Fish read.
The Filling Station gives me shivers -- the surprising ending -- how after the relentless repetition of dirty, the station, suit, family,the dog (who is comfy) the pervasive oil, the warning --"Be Careful", the attention to detail, including the taboret, the dim doily (embroidered with daisy stitch...)Bishop might be called "a poets' poet" -- certainly she works her vocabulary carefully -- no one would speak of a "hirsute begonia", which sounds like an "extraneous plant" which indeed has no reason for being in this dirty station.
And then, the final stanza brings in "somebody" -- like an unidentified mystery
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the cans
for this uncannily soft whisper "es so (it is so), so - so
(not so-so, as not important at all)but so, as in, so it is, which rhymes with sew,
the way our lives are stitched together... how we are, indirectly like those "high-strung automobiles." to which the cans whisper... And then the final "somebody" --
Somebody loves us all.
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