Poetry Saturday – In a Station of the Metro

Poetry Saturday - In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This brief, Imagist work offers a glimpse into a single moment. A striking visual is presented, which at first seems short and simple–but on closer examination spirals deeply with sensation, location, and meaning.

Some have likened it to a Japanese haiku, although Pound himself has denied that it is intended to be a haiku, saying that he would not have arbitrarily chosen a form, then written a poem to simply fill it. To him, this would have been against everything poetry stands for–the sense of the immediate, organic, and spontaneous (with hidden scaffolding).

The poem grew organically from a moment Pound experienced coming off a subway train. He got off a train in Paris and was stricken by the beauty of many faces walking and bunching in a crowd, in the rain. He couldn’t find the words to express exactly what he felt and struggled with putting it down all day–until he developed what he called an “equation… not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that–a “pattern,” or hardly a pattern, if by “pattern,” you mean something with a “repeat” in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour.”

Pound’s “one image poem” does indeed impart the elements necessary for haiku (or a hokku)–a brief image, an established time of year (wet–rainy, probably spring or fall), and a connection to “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” (people walking, embarking or disembarking the train, daytime during the rain, and at a station of the metro). Since Pound was a scholar of Eastern poetic forms, he no doubt was influenced by the haiku for this–and also by Japanese or Chinese painting, which also presents a single flashed moment, forever implied by only a few strokes, but his work is a new form entirely. He says with this type of form, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself into a thing inward and subjective.”

Written in 1913, the poem was originally published with spaces between phrases. The spacing would force the reader to slow down, experience each fall of sound like a flump in the snow. Focus.

The apparition | of these faces | in the crowd;

Petals | on a wet, black | bough

(try reading it out loud and pausing on each little section. See how it rolls gently, like rain or snow?).

A little mini bio teaser:

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972), is one of the world’s most respected poets, arguably one of America’s most influential. He made tremendous headway in breaking away from the rhymed, formal poetry of previous centuries–adopting a style of free verse that had its own inherent musical structure, not reliant upon canonical forms. He was a major player in the Modernist movement and had heavy ties to others in the field, including artists and musicians. He is also well known for having mentored TS Eliot, composer of “The Wasteland,” and other monumental works.

He is a fascinating writer and if you have the time, I’d recommend the tidbits on Wikipedia, just to get you acquainted, although they leave out a lot of the juicy tidbits. He was outspone against war, and was an expatriate during World War II, but later arrested for having broadcast what was then considered anti-American diatribes (they were really anti-War machine diatribes–but it was 1949). It’s said that when he was arrested, they took him without anything but the clothes he was wearing–and a Mandarin Chinese dictionary that happened to be stuck in his pocket. He appreciated the visual value of the Chinese language and was responsible for translating many ancient Chinese poems into his own lyrical style.

I recommend: Selected Poems of Ezra Pound for further reading.