In his short poem “In a Station of the Metro,” poet Ezra Pound is comparing the beautiful faces he sees on a night in the Paris Metro with flower petals on a wet branch. The entire poem reads,

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

In the first line of the poem, Pound makes an interesting observation of the people around him by comparing them to ghosts. The word apparition gives the idea that the people's faces are obscured and makes the people seem less than human. Then, in the next line, he compares their appearance to flower petals, which are colorful, fragile pieces of nature. By describing the bough these petals are on as wet” and “black," Pound emphasizes the contrast between the appearance of the people and their location and says that their faces appear beautiful and vibrant in their dreary environment. This comparison suggests that beauty can be found even in dark places, like a dark metro station.

This poem is also a testament to Pound’s theory of imagism, which critiqued excessive rhetoric and vague language in poetry and advocated for the use of precise images. By making a straightforward comparison like the one in this poem, Pound shows how meaning can be created with just a few carefully chosen words that construct a specific image.

What is the comparison Pound makes in "In a Station of the Metro"? What is he trying to accomplish with that comparison?

Before diving into a discussion of Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” it is worth taking a minute to outline Pound’s style so we can understand his goals. Ezra Pound was the founder of a poetic style called Imagism. The Imagist poets admired precision of language; they shunned verbose, allusion-laden styles of earlier poetry. Pound described the “image” as,

that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

This definition functions as a statement of Pound’s objective for his poetry: to impart a profound “intellectual and emotional” experience using as few words as possible.

With this context in mind, let’s examine Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”. This short poem is often described as the archetypal example of the Imagist style for how it creates a poignant mental picture using only fourteen words. The poem is below in its entirety,

“In A Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The title of Pound’s poem is noteworthy and important to the poem's context because it provides the setting: a busy metro station. Without the context provided by the title, the single metaphor in the poem would lack weight.

The poem compares the faces in the crowded metro to petals on a wet, black bough of a tree. The metaphor is strengthened by the total lack of verbs in the poem. With “In a Station of the Metro”, Pound crisply captures a single moment with precise language. If we re-examine Pound’s own purpose with his poetry of capturing “an instant in time” with words, most would argue that he accomplished his goal.

What is the comparison Pound makes in poem "In a Station of the Metro"? What is he trying to accomplish with that comparison? In your opinion, has Pound succeeded in creating an "exact visual image" that makes "a total poetic statement"? Support your answer with references to the poem.

In the poem "In a Station of the Metro," Pound makes a comparison between faces in a crowd and petals on a wet, black tree branch.

What he's trying to accomplish with this comparison is to give us an exact visual image that will make us look at both the crowd of faces and the tree branch in a different way.

As a leading proponent of the school of poetry called Imagism, Pound strives to give us a precise image written in language that people can readily understand. One could argue that in "In a Station of the Metro," Pound succeeds admirably in this endeavor, not least because the poem consists of only two lines.

The shortness of the poem forces us to concentrate on the images presented and encourages us to see them in our mind's eye. "In a Station of the Metro" does what all good poems should do and stimulates our imagination.

What is particularly effective about the poem is that it fuses two separate realms of reality together, the subjective impression of the poet and the objective world of the crowd of faces making its way to a crowded subway station.

The poet takes a normal scene from everyday life and, with the use of his imagination, transforms it into a striking image of petals on a wet, black bough. In doing so, he gives us a synthesis of the subjective and the objective, and it is this that makes for a complete poetic statement.