Imagist Poetry: Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

Introduction: Pound's Imagist Ideal

Mike Meyer writes that "images give us the physical world to experience in our imaginations. Some poems do just that; they make no comment about what they describe." This definition fits perfectly the images found in Ezra Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro." The concise two-line poem is also an example of Pound fulfilling his own dictum for what the ideal Imagist poem should be. In the February 15, 1912 issue of The New Age, Pound wrote:

We must have a simplicity of utterance, which is different from the simplicity and directness of daily speech. This difference, this dignity, cannot be conferred by florid adjectives or elaborate hyperbole; it must be conveyed by art and by the art of the verse structure, by something which exalts the reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something arranged more finely than the commonplace. (Nuwer)

Just months later, in April 1913, he published his famous haiku in Harriet Monroe's Poetry.

In "In a Station of the Metro," Pound cuts words to the bare bone. The adjectives are far from florid and hyperbole is nonexistent. Yet there is something in his lines that "exalts" the reader, lifting him above the "commonplace." In this haiku, Pound demonstrates how a poet using concrete images — about which he makes no comment at all — can create a lasting, memorable picture in the reader's imagination that reverberates with individual meaning depending on the perceptions of each reader.

The First Line: Urban Apparitions

In the first line, a specific physical image is presented. From the title we already know that we are in a station of the Metro, and from general knowledge we understand that the Metro is the underground subway in Paris. Pound then allows us to see: The apparition of these faces in the crowd.

It is remarkable what these few words manage to suggest through imaginative imagery. Simply knowing that we are in a Metro station conjures a wealth of associations: city, dirt, grime, underground spaces, dullness, conformity, darkness, artificiality, unpleasant odors, and the routine of the workday. The word "crowd" adds connotations of herd mentality, with humanity packed together. A cityscape in a crowded subway or metro station connotes both a sense of the too-real and the unreal. Masses of humanity elbow to elbow, with scarcely room to breathe, suggests dehumanization and the loneliness of the individual — people jammed close enough to smell each other's presence, yet avoiding eye contact; so together, yet so separate. The fact that Pound shows us only faces at the metro station, not whole bodies, opens another interpretive possibility. The person doing the seeing may be inside the train, passing quickly through a station, glimpsing only a blur of impersonal faces.

The word "apparition" brings a sense of the strange and ghostly, building the impression of inhumanity. These are not individual humans waiting in the metro station; they are ghostly faces — undifferentiated, dehumanized, unalive. With a range of possible meanings, "apparition" expands the imagery in multiple directions. First, once a reader encounters these lines, the faces will always return as an apparition in the mind. Second, the faces could appear to be ghosts even though they are living people, an effect appropriate to the notion that the city's underground railway makes people seem barely alive. Third, the apparitions could be ghostly remembrances of people no longer living, whose faces peer at the watcher from among the more or less dead-seeming faces in the crowd. Or the metro station could be imagined as closed, its apparitions being all the people who used to wait there as part of their daily routine. Anyone who has been one of those anonymous faces waiting for a subway train will understand the reverberations of imagining oneself losing identity among the crowd — standing there every day on the way to an equally anonymous job, feeling barely alive in a daily deadly routine.

To add yet another dimension to Pound's already layered image, critic Hugh Kenner reads "In a Station of the Metro" as a poem that evokes "a crowd seen underground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Kore saw crowds in Hades" (Lyons). This possibility adds a vast classical universality to the faces, deepening the dimensions of the ghostly apparitions and introducing enlarged interpretations of hell and hell on earth.

The Second Line: A Contrasting Nature Image

In the second line, Pound presents a strongly contrasting Oriental image drawn from nature: Petals on a wet, black bough. Petals separated from the flower can scarcely be called alive. They are stuck randomly on a black bough — a bough that is wet, perhaps because it has been rained upon, or because it is detached from its tree and floating in a river. Rain and water are usually associated with life, but here we begin to question that association. A bough is a branch of a tree, ordinarily connected to something living, but this bough is black, the color of death. We are not told what color the petals are; we know only that they stand in stark contrast to the dark bough, just as the second line of the poem stands in stark contrast to the first.

The faces of the first line become the petals of the second. The juxtaposition of the two images produces a shock — a collision or clash, as if one metro train slams into another. It is a radical switch of viewpoint, presenting an alternative image against what conventional logic would have expected to follow the first line. Yet if the petals and the faces both stand for death, then there is unity after all.

Conclusion: The Vastness of Two Lines

The gift of the physical world offered in the imagery of this two-line poem is vast. Pound's words form diverse pictures that work like a collage for the mind's eye. Included are images ranging from life and death on the Paris Metro, to the Hades of classical Greece, to a delicate Japanese painting — all combining to evoke the heights and depths of human thought and emotion, and to remain continually and vividly etched in the reader's imagination.

Bibliography

Goya, Jose Manuel Losada. "Poetic Image and Tradition in Western European Modernism: Pound, Lorca, Claudel." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Unpaged. (April 8, 2002).

Lyons, Donald. "A Major Minor: Ezra Pound's Poetry." The New Criterion. Unpaged. (April 8, 2002).

Nuwer, Hank. "An Appreciation of Ezra Pound, Editor." Unpaged. (April 8, 2002).