ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
conditions by which the memory arises in the consciousness. Such a phenomenology
locates immanence within repetition; this dynamic within the elegy is consoling for
multiple reasons. “North Haven” does not ritualize grief so as to stabilize memory, but
rather copes through a conception of time that summons the past alongside the
unfolding present.
Repetition, in Bishop’s hands, is securely fastened to the cognitive and affective
aspects of recognition, contingent – of course – upon memory, as well as perspective
in all senses: spatial, temporal, optical, and subjective. “North Haven” conceptualizes
repetition as both structure and stimulus for memory, as well as for the imagination:
“The islands haven't shifted since last summer,/ even if I like to pretend they have/ —
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,/ a little north, a little south, or sidewise” (6-9). As
though anticipating her own future readings of the poem, she constructs a poem
invested in re-activating apperception and in articulating repetition’s conjugal
relationship to the imagination. As such, the re-read poem possesses an energy that
has an infinitely renewable relation to subjectivity.
The speaker in Bishop’s mid-career poem, “Filling Station,” undergoes subjectivation
through active attendance to the other. In her study, Costello gestures to the altruistic
dimension in this poem, as it performs perspectival realignments at the speaker’s own
expense (Costello 38). The speaker of “Filling Station” first confronts the grime of the
station from a classed, feminized point of view that responds to her environment with
disgust (Costello 38). However, the speaker searches for a home amid the filth that
had initially repulsed her. The poem marks a classed and gendered difference between
the beholder of the filling station and the family who had resided and presumably
worked there. In her search, the speaker happens upon tokens of domestic care: a
doily, an “extraneous” plant, and an arrangement of cans, signs of what Costello
describes as a “creative impulse . . .small attempts at aesthetic order which express
affection” (Costello 39). The final stanza of Bishop’s poem evolves through
repetition: anaphora, a loose iambic meter, rhyme (such as “doily” and “oily,” a mere
letter apart from one another) and a reiterative onomatopoeic honest signal. An
unnamed female presence places the cans in order “. . . so that they softly say:/ Esso—
so—so—so/ To high-strung automobiles./ Somebody loves us all” (Bishop Complete
Poems 38-41).
In these final lines, the repetitive “so” sounds that emerge out of ESSO, which are the
initials of Eastern States Standard Oil, are also – according to Bishop – the signals
repeated to console a horse (Bishop One Art 638). Significantly, the personified cans
identify their contents by their brand name; however, the branded objects – in their
repetitive act of utterance – shrug off their identifications and are actualized as debranded subjectivities. In turn, an activity initially of repetitive naming undergoes a
linguistic and semantic torque and becomes a repeated gesture of consolation. A
recognizable name for a corporation becomes a three-syllable affectively charged
sound: one of consolation.
Accurate discernment is carried out by the speaker’s imagination, as she reads the
cans’ utterances as honest signals undertaken in a process of altruistic (de-)
identification and exchange with the “high strung automobiles.” Gesturing towards the
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