In a Station of the Metro is one of the best-known early poems by the American poet Ezra Pound. The poem was published in 1916. Pound wrote “In a Station of the Metro” to express the feelings and thoughts he experienced one day while emerging from the Paris Metro (subway or underground railway). Only two lines long, the poem offers a textbook example of an image as a poetic device:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound’s poem is remarkably concise. It calls attention to the similarity between ghostlike faces emerging in the dark and delicate petals on a branch in the spring rain. The poem communicates a poignant sense of the beauty and fragility of human life, suggesting its connections to the cycles of nature, even in an urban setting.
Pound is considered one of the fathers of Imagism, a poetic style that aims to create pictures with words through the rhythms of poetry. By simply placing two images side by side, rather than stating their likeness or identity, Pound avoids a preaching tone. He also allows the reader a wider scope in responding to his images. Rather than lecturing the reader about life’s brevity, the poem simply invites readers to see the likeness and to draw their own conclusions. Pound imagined the reader’s experience to be an open-ended quest, in which ideas and understanding would be sparked by the perception of similarities and differences.
“In a Station of the Metro” is typical of the poetry of the early and middle 1900’s in a number of ways. It is expressive yet impersonal, and it aims to present rather than persuade. It demonstrates on a smaller scale the technique used in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Pound’s later work The Cantos (1925-1968). These much longer poems use fragments from a vast range of historical and literary texts to draw readers into the poetic experience.
For more information about Pound, see Pound, Ezra. See also American literature (Modernist poetry); Poetry (Beginnings of modern poetry).
