In a Station of the Metro

Wow. My first impression of Pound’s In a Station of the Metro was that it is… short (even shorter than Sandburg’s Fog)! It’s concise, and definitely an imagist poem: slimmed down, stripped bare, distilled to a simple, unembellished form. Despite, and yet perhaps thanks to its astounding brevity, Pound’s poem is surprisingly beautiful. It draws a unique metaphoric relationship between two otherwise unrelated images.

It makes me think of a dark street (train track, subway tunnel, etc.) stretching into the distance and the white faces of travelers in the foreground, some close, some further away, that stand out against the bleakness of their surroundings like beautiful “petals” against the bough of a tree. The use of the word “apparition” (and indeed the feeling and imagery that the poem evokes) gives the poem a wistful, ghostly, misty, and memory-like quality, as if the poet is recalling faces from his memory that stand out against the black expanse of his life (that stretches into the future like the branch of a tree into the wind, or a subway tunnel into the distance).

Pound’s haiku-style poem compresses an entire image into two lines. Its simplicity allows the reader to draw their own meaning from the images that it creates and the feeling that it evokes, with each interpretation of the poem influenced by the unique experiences of the reader.

I grew up in Australia and I am constantly shocked when I see a face in a crowd here that is the “spitting image” of someone from home, and not even anyone especially significant to my life… the mother of a girl I went to school with, my brother’s first grade teacher, a guy who pushed carts for a supermarket in my home town, etc. Especially during my first few years living here, these faces were like “petals” from my memory- apparitions of something familiar and known… that stood out against the “wet, black bough” that was the foreign and lonely place in which I found myself. 

The juxtaposition of “petals” and “wet, black bough” is interesting because each element exudes a completely different vibe; petals are light, delicate, beautiful, and somewhat jovial, while “a wet, black bough” seems strong, cold, and harsh in comparison. Pound’s metaphor, while surprising, seems apt- bright and beautiful petals set against a wet, black bough are like familiar faces spotted in an alien crowd.