Eleanor Cook on Bishop's "Filling Station" and Hopper's "Gas"

Edward Hopper, Gas (1940)

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), makes an intriguing comparison between Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1955; Questions of Travel, 1965) and Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940). She says of “Filling Station,”

It is a descriptive poem, yes, but I think Bishop may be writing an ekphrasis of sorts, an ekphrasis of a painting that should exist, a shadow painting. Look at Edward Hopper’s painting Gas (1940), a painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Point for point, “Filling Station” is the opposite. Hopper’s is meticulously clean, as against “Oh, but it is dirty!” The owner shutting it down in the evening is dressed in white shirt and tie, as against Father dressed in an ill-fitting “dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit.” There is no outer porch with “grease- / impregnated wickerwork,” a dog, comic books, taboret with a doily and “a big hirsute begonia” (a fine touch). Bishop’s poem depicts a filling station that is more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting. 

I’m not sure what Cook is getting at when she says “Filling Station” may be an “ekphrasis of sorts.” There’s nothing in the poem that suggests that. It appears to be a record of what Bishop saw at an actual gas station. Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), says “Filling Station” is a “response to direct observation.” Cook’s contrasting of “Filling Station” with Hopper’s Gas is interesting. Her point about Bishop’s poem depicting a gas station that is “more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting” is a good one. She says that Hopper’s painting is of a gas station “seen as aesthetic object.” I think Bishop’s poem is about a gas station seen as a piece of folk art. In that sense, I suppose, "Filling Station" is an "ekphrasis of sorts."