"In a Station of the Metro"

Although untraditional, Ezra Pound’s work “In a Station of the Metro” is truly a poem. Pound creatively uses imagery confined within lines to convey meaning. If the title is included as one of the lines of the poem, each line delineates a single image. We move from an image of machinery (the Metro), to human beings (faces), to nature (flower petals). The layout of the poem draws parallels between these intentionally distinct and unrelated images. Throughout the lines of the poem each image becomes smaller, from the metro to the humans to the flowers. Pound emphasizes the image of “these faces” and the “wet, black bough” by slowing the tempo at these moments.

The word “apparition” has connotative power in this poem. It suggests the supernatural, immaterial, and a sudden unexpected experience. Apparition is often associated with ghosts and could elicit a sense of death. Death is reinforced by the “black” of the flower’s bough. However, there are also positive emotions demonstrated in Pound’s poem creating contradictory feelings: death and life, fragility and strength, and speed and stillness.

The observed stillness in the poem is due to the absence of verbs, rhyme, and meter. Lacking action words, “In a Station of the Metro” yields the impression of a moment caught in time. This static tone illuminates the contrast between the busy scene in the Metro station and the natural still depiction of the flowers on the bough.

Pound is careful to stress only nouns in the first line (apparition, faces, and crowd) while leaving all prepositional words unstressed. In the last line there is a triple stress on “wet, black bough” causing the reader to contemplate the image even after the poem has concluded.

Despite it’s unorthodox style and economy of words, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is open to extensive interpretation in part due to its inherent simplicity.