Life is almost as short as Ezra Pound’s poem “In a station of the Metro”. My uncle owns a café in the town of Patterson; many of his customers are people who are in their upper forties and lower fifties of age. Every time we have talks about life they always tell me that life is short and that it flies by. “In a Station of the Metro” is a poem because it presents the reader with imagery, symbolism, and a deep meaning of life in just two lines. The reader can infer from line one when Pound says “these faces”, he is implying that he is there observing and watching the people at the station.
The first line of the poem has vivid imagery; it describes faces of people waiting at the transit station. The important factor of this line is the word “apparition”, this word is usually attached to a person or character that has passed away or was murdered. This is important to the poem because it relates to the second line, “Petals on a wet, black bough”, this adds to the ominous yet true meaning of the poem which describes how all the people at the station are bound to pass through their own personal timeline of life; everybody there at the station has their short and limited existence on this earth. That is why Pound describes them as “apparitions” because he knows that people will come and go as long as the earth keeps revolving. The second line also paints a picture in the reader’s mind of petals on a black branch of a tree. The petals have to fall off sometime as the tree is black and is dying, just as we have to fall to death at some point in our lives. Another important factor that makes “In a Station of the Metro” a poem is the shortness of it; the two lines make a powerful statement of the shortness of life which is directly related to the shortness of the poem.
The first line of the poem has vivid imagery; it describes faces of people waiting at the transit station. The important factor of this line is the word “apparition”, this word is usually attached to a person or character that has passed away or was murdered. This is important to the poem because it relates to the second line, “Petals on a wet, black bough”, this adds to the ominous yet true meaning of the poem which describes how all the people at the station are bound to pass through their own personal timeline of life; everybody there at the station has their short and limited existence on this earth. That is why Pound describes them as “apparitions” because he knows that people will come and go as long as the earth keeps revolving. The second line also paints a picture in the reader’s mind of petals on a black branch of a tree. The petals have to fall off sometime as the tree is black and is dying, just as we have to fall to death at some point in our lives. Another important factor that makes “In a Station of the Metro” a poem is the shortness of it; the two lines make a powerful statement of the shortness of life which is directly related to the shortness of the poem.
“In a station of the Metro” is a work of poetry because of the deep meaning of the content, the shortness of life, how death takes us away, and the imagery used to convey these ideas. Pound had a great understanding of the nature of the universe and he creatively converyed it through this short, two lined, piece of poetry.
Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro”. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Peter Simpson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
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