Analysis of “In a Station of the Metro”

Today, I would like to talk to you about a poem I recently read and that caught my attention. It’s called “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound.

What makes this poem so special is that it only consists of two lines. I’ll write it down here, so you don’t have to search for it 😉

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

-by Ezra Pound

This short poem, also considered to be a Haiku, was released in 1913. In it, Ezra Pound compares a busy metro station to a tree branch on a rainy night.

Overall, the poem contains 20 words and none of them are verbs, which evokes a feeling of epiphany- a sudden and striking realisation. Furthermore, it allows the reader to solely focus on the two images presented in the poem.

The first line (“the apparition of these faces in the crowd”) helps to set the scene. Thanks to the title, we can assume that realistically, everything takes place in a metro station. We can imagine our poet sitting on a bench in a very populous station; in fact, it’s so packed that he only catches glimpses of the other passenger’s faces.

The use of the word “apparition” is most likely supposed to enhance the speed of those fleeting faces to the point where our poet might wonder, whether they’re real at all. They disappear as quickly as they appeared. Everyone blurs together, and he can’t really tell the difference between those faces anymore.

This leads Pound to his second line, “petals on a wet, black bough”. The “petals” symbolise all those blurry faces. That’s when he connects an everyday-situation, influenced by people and a lot of machinery, with nature.

While a dark and wet metro station has a rather negative connotation, the image of a “dark, wet bough” provides us with a rather “dark romantic” feeling.

So, by pairing the first with the second line, the poet also romanticises a busy (often negatively associated) metro station, telling the reader that there’s beauty in a seemingly unimportant and grim situation or scenery.

Furthermore, by linking “faces” to “petals”, Pound suggests that every face, although not always very distinct from one another in a crowd, has a certain aesthetic to it.

Personally, I really enjoyed Ezra Pound’s poem, which is mostly because he romanticised an everyday-situation. I feel like he let the reader participate in him finding some sort of serendipity in the metro; especially since the poem is very short and “to the point”.

It gives the impression that we just had a very quick chance to see inside his head for this spontaneous thought.

We should try to find the appeal in everything that we do; I think this would make life a bit more bearable in stressful and depressing times.

Ezra Pound teaches us to live in the moment; to be present and take a break from all of our duties and worries for a short while.

Do you have different interpretations? Feel free to let me know in the comments. 🙂