In his essay “Action and Rest: The Influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop,” Ben Howard notes the strong influence Hopkins had on poems like “The Prodigal” and “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. Another of Bishop's poems that seems to draw heavily, both thematically and stylistically, from Hopkins is “Filling Station,” which describes a dirty gas station and the family who owns it. In its exploration of the filth that man spreads on his environment, the poem seems to imitate several elements of Hopkins' “The Greatness of God.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The most obvious connection between “Greatness of God” and “Fueling Station” is the shared topic. The first line of Bishop's poem, "Oh, but it's dirty!" (1) directly reflects the world “burned by commerce, tarnished, smeared by toil” described by Hopkins (6). Furthermore, just as Hopkins' poem focuses on the fact that it is "man" who causes this filth (7), Bishop describes the "Father" and the "anointed sons" as embodying the filth of the station (7, 11 ). Finally, the most compelling image that Bishop draws from Hopkins is that of God's greatness as “the slime of oil/crushed” (3-4). The words “oil” and “fat” permeate the poem, and Bishop even employs the word “crushed” in the third stanza, directly evoking Hopkins' line. Bishop, however, takes Hopkins' image of oozing oil and turns it on its head, using it to represent not the power of God (as in Hopkins' poem), but the influence of man. Furthermore, Bishop's use of the oil image differs from that of Hopkins in that in “God's Grandeur” it is the action of crushing the olive and producing the oil that gives the image its meaning; in “Filling Station,” however, the oil stagnates in a “black, eerie translucence” (4-5). In addition to appropriating Hopkins' subject of human filth, Bishop also employs some of his well-known stylistic features. The most significant of these is the creation of hyphenated compound adjectives. They appear in Bishop's poetry in lines such as “soaked in oil, permeated with oil” and “soaked in fat” (3, 17-8). Although these compound adjectives do not appear specifically in “God's Grandeur,” they are prominent in many of Hopkins' other poems. “The Windhover” has perhaps the best examples of these compound descriptors as it features a “dawn-drawn hawk” and ends with the image of “bleak-blue embers” (2, 13). Bishop and Hopkins both use strings of adjectives to describe the same noun: in Hopkins, the world is "burnt...smeared, smeared" (6), while in Bishop the oil around the station is "eerie, completely black" ( 4-5). Finally, Bishop's poetry seems perhaps to make use of Hopkins' elastic rhythm. All lines have 3 or 4 major accents, suggesting a more organized metrical scheme than free verse. At least a few lines, like “Someone embroidered the newspaper. / Someone waters the plant, / or maybe oils it. Somebody", with their consistent pattern of three stresses and numbers and varying patterns of unstressed syllables, seem to have an elastic rhythm, unmistakably reflecting Hopkins' influence. While "God's Grandeur" and "Filling Station" begin by describing dirty scenes, both poems feature a turning point in the last stanza, this turning point occurs at the beginning of the sestina with the phrase "And for all this" (11) focuses on how the presence of the “Holy Spirit” occurs. in nature it maintains a “dearest freshness” despite the blackening influence of man (13, 10). In Bishop, the description of the filling station moves to the family porch,.