“In a Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
I was originally unsure of where to go with this poem. It seemed so simple, almost not enough. This poem, however, is a true modernistic poem. It is set in an urban setting, with few words that all contribute to a meaning or image that the poet wants to express. It expresses a precise visual experience through a very expressive metaphor. It is the use of this metaphor that gives the reader of this poem a very crisp visual of the metro and people he sees while he is at the station. The atmosphere and landscape of the station is visualized in your head and the image of these faces, petals appearing out of the trains during is such an everyday commonplace thing yet something that people wouldn’t necessarily notice as beautiful or striking.
I was originally unsure of where to go with this poem. It seemed so simple, almost not enough. This poem, however, is a true modernistic poem. It is set in an urban setting, with few words that all contribute to a meaning or image that the poet wants to express. It expresses a precise visual experience through a very expressive metaphor. It is the use of this metaphor that gives the reader of this poem a very crisp visual of the metro and people he sees while he is at the station. The atmosphere and landscape of the station is visualized in your head and the image of these faces, petals appearing out of the trains during is such an everyday commonplace thing yet something that people wouldn’t necessarily notice as beautiful or striking.
I found three pictures that I feel encompass the visuals and emotions I get from this poem. The first one is a picture of a Paris metro station. This station is full of shadow and harshness, cold and unfriendly. It is a representation of the everyday, the mundane. Metro stations are cold, hard and dirty, a dark place where people travel to and fro.
The next picture is one that represents the apparition of “these faces in the crowd”. These kisses are things that are beautiful that appear in the background of the mundane making the mundane, black background special.
This last picture is one of a beautiful woman walking the streets of Paris with a confident elegant air. I think that this picture represents the time period in which Pound wrote this poem and together with the other pictures expresses the line, “Petals on a wet, black bough”. Pound wrote this poem about the faces in a station of the Paris metro that he saw as petals in a mundane background. It seems that these “petals” must have been faces of women which drew his attention through the crowd in the busy, cold metro.
Looking at this poem as a metaphor, the first line is the tenor and the second line is the vehicle, more abstract. The author uses distinct words on the line that is the vehicle so he can create the image of the faces in the crowd that appear so beautiful to him. The words that he uses create a complicated metaphor yet a vivid image of the beautiful in the mundane. Petals are beautiful and elegant, feminine. Wet, black boughs are hard looking, dark, and slippery. In only two lines, Pound has created a vivid image, yet there is no kind of emotion that I can find. It could be that he wants to write the poem exactly how he experienced the situation. Maybe he was waiting for a train, reading a paper, when these beautiful women stepped off the train and he couldn’t help but noticed how they brightened the station as they walked off with their children or baggage.
5 comments:
I really like your blog on the imagery in the Metro, it opened up my eyes and gave me a better understanding of the poem and analysis of each line itself. The images you provided helped too with the visual understanding of the poem.
I definitely agree with your claim that the poem's modernism is shown through the vivid image it creates with so few words. The beauty of imagism is that it describes pictures exactly as they are (this tends to make the poems short). This is because it focuses more on the focus of imagism is on the significance of the image conveyed, not on the beauty of the diction and literary devices used. This makes it unique from classic poetry such as Shakespearean.
i love that you used pictures to represent the imagery in this poem. I am a very visual learner so it really helped me to better understand pounds poem.
Its funny, I never actually realized that "petals on a wet black bough" was referring to the faces peering out of the windows of a black subway train. The poem makes alot more sense when you can understand more than 50% of it. But I really like your reading of the poem, especially your analysis on the lack of emotion in the poem. The poem seems to have a "matter-of-fact" tone. In a sense it dehumanizes it, and allows readers to focus specifically on the image of the poem, as you said.
Your final image is so close to what I "saw" when I read this poem. I imagine a very crowded subway station full of people rushing to and from work in their black suits, the only contrast is the creamy, pink skin of their faces.
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