The poem uses lots of repetition, which creates rhythm, musicality, and emphasis.
Some repetitions occur across stanzas. For instance, the word "dirty" appears in lines 1, 7, 13, and 20:
- "Oh, but it is dirty!"
- "Father wears a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit"
- "all quite thoroughly dirty"
- "a dirty dog, quite comfy"
The repetition makes it impossible to ignore this key element of the gas station: it is almost shockingly unclean. The speaker also frequently repeats some version of the words "oil" and "grease":
- In line 3, the speaker uses diacope and more general parallelism, describing the gas station as "oil-soaked, oil-permeated."
- They use the phrase "oil-soaked" again in line 8, describing the father's uniform.
- In line 11, they call the sons who work at the station "greasy."
- In lines 17-18, they call the furniture outside the gas station "grease-impregnated."
All in all, these repetitions emphasize that oil and grease have infiltrated every square inch of this place as well as the people who work and possibly live there.
There are other forms of repetition in the poem too. For example, listen to the polysyndeton in lines 10-11, which makes the adjectives describing the sons pile up in a potentially limitless list:
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
It sounds like the speaker could go on and on describing just how filthy these sons are.
Finally, note that the poem can practically be broken in half based on the words the speaker repeats:
- The words "dirty," "filling station," "oil," and "grease" are repeated throughout the first three stanzas.
- By contrast, stanzas 4-6 repeat the words "color," "taboret," "doily," and "embroidered."
The repetitions in the poem's first half highlight the gas station's utilitarian ugliness, while those in the poem's second half highlight the human touch that nevertheless fills the space. The gas station might be filthy, but it's also speckled with evidence that someone cares for it and the people working there.
(The poem also contains a great deal of anaphora, discussed in a separate entry in this guide.)