Stanza 4 Summary

Lines 10-12

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
   the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

• Line 10 gives us a touch of anaphora with the repetition of "their [fill in the blanks]" from the end of line 9. Why? We'll guess it creates a rhythmic feel that pushes the lines forward, but also because it links the two stanzas together to reinforce the continuity of the conversation the students are having. And that conversation is pretty straightforward. The students talk about their "hiding places" as sacred. 
• The second half of line 10 goes back to the car, though. That "but" seems to draw attention to itself, as if something unexpected has occurred. Although everyone in the class is beginning to identify his or her sacred place, the car that began the conversation continues to come up. 
• So why does the speaker mention that? Perhaps it's because the car is a small, quiet, private place, like a miniature room that moves down the street. It's both private and in motion. Guess what else is like that? "Stanza" means room in Italian. So each stanza in this poem is like a room, but the repetitive elements, the indented middle line, the tense shifts—all these things move the "rooms." In a way, it's like the poem is a car, moving down the page. We don't know why, in particular, that image of the car stuck out, but we can see how the poem is imitating its content, and that clearly means something to the class, and to the speaker. 
• For our next indented line, "the car in motion." We hear a near rhyme here with "had been spoken." Go ahead and say those two lines out loud. Hear it? They're not formally identical (please park your eyes in the "Form and Meter" section for more on that), but they both have two accented sounds, and they both start with that O sound and end with that N sound. With that rhyming, our speaker is calling attention to these lines. "The car in motion" is a sacred place, but perhaps it's also a metaphor. It seems that the speaker might think the poem is a sacred place, what with these subtle connections between the car and the poem itself. 
• Moving on, line 12 starts off with another one of those participial phrases. We're back in the present tense and there's music filling the car, just like there's some poetry awesomeness filling each stanza. We have like a 350 horsepower (whatever that is, right?) engine propelling the poem forward with tense shifts, repetition, and indentation (all the things we mentioned above). That's the music filling the room. Just like the serious boy who gets to play his own tapes, the speaker gets to pick his own words for the poem. 
• The second half of line 12 mentions one other person. Who is that? Where? It could be someone in class. Or the reader.
• Or you. Notice again the enjambment, so that, read as one whole line, the line says that music is both filling the car and filling "one other person." It's as if this sacred place with music has the power to connect with other people. Remember how the serious guy mentioned the car and then everyone else started talking about their sacred places? Here we're reminded of that. One admission inspired a bunch of others.