In a Station of the Metro - Poem Explanation - Ezra Pound
About Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) will always be remembered for being at the very centre of the Modern Movement of twentieth century literature. Born in Hailey, Idaho and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, he dedicated his life to the cause of poetry. His close acquaintances included almost all the leading moderns: WB Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolitttle (HD), Wyndham Lewis and others. He worked as a foreign editor for Poetry, a magazine of verse edited by Harriet Monroe from 1912. A founder- leader of the Imagist Movement, Pound contributed to modern poetry through his insistence on the quality of sound in it, that is, the poem 'heard spoken'. He was very much concerned about how a poem presented itself on a page qualitatively as is possible with music.
Imagism, with which Ezra Pound's name is inseparably associated, was a movement that flourished in English and American literary circles between 1912 and 1917. This movement was a revolt against what Pound described as the 'rather blurry, messy... sentimentalistic mannerish', poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. Amy Lowell who brought out three imagist anthologies, including Some Imagist Poets, describes in the preface how imagist poetry decided to abandon conventional poetic materials and versification in order to freely choose any subject, create its own rhythm, use common speech and present an image that is hard, clear and concentrated. Written in free verse, a typical imagist poem seeks to render as precisely, as vividly and as tersely as possible, without comment or generalisation, the writer's response to a visual object or scene. Often the impression is rendered by means of a metaphor or by juxtaposing the description of one object with that of a second and diverse objects. Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' is an imagist poem unparalleled in its degree of concentrated expression. This poem was first written in 36 lines, then reduced to 18 and then to just two lines the way it appears now. rendering an experience he struggled to express. Once while getting out of a metro train in Paris, he saw a beautiful face, then others, a woman's and a child's. Greatly moved by this scene he tried all day to express this sudden and lovely emotion. Words could not equal that experience but he suddenly realised that he could equate it in 'little splotches of colour', thus making the whole expression as precise and exact as a painting. Pound reproduced the experience in a station of the metro.
'In a Station of the Metro' Poem
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Glossary
1. metro an underground railway system in a city
2 apparition a sudden or dramatic appearance especially of a ghost or phantom.
Explanatory Notes
1. Pound saw a number of faces when he got off the train at the station. The experience he underwent is expressed through the use of a metaphor. He felt that the faces appeared like petals that stick to a wet, black bough. The reader is expected to see the blackness of the bough against whose background the colourful petals stand contrasted here the colourful faces of people against the dark background of the station. The few petals that stick to the bough remind us of the shower of petals that fall with rain or a gust of wind. Only a few petals managed to stick to the bough. In a large crowd of people at the railway station only a few remain glued to the poet's imagination and find a place in the poem.
2. Equating an experience in terms of touch or sight or smell is what Pound called 'image' or 'vortex'. He defined an image as 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'. An objective correlative needs to be devised in order to render the experience exactly as the poet experienced it.
3. This composition is clearly influenced by the Japanese haiku or hokku-a lyric form of seventeen syllables that represents the poet's impression of a natural object or scene, viewed at a particular season, or month.
4. This poem like William Carlos Williams' 'The Red Wheelbarrow' is just not paraphrasable.
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