"In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound: An Analysis

Ezra Pound was a pioneer of the Imagist movement in the modernist period of American literature. Imagism was a movement that did not follow traditional styles and suggested that everyone could be free about art. Imagism opposed poetic elements such as meter, rhyme, and length. The common idea of imagists is that they wanted poems to reflect emotions as clearly as possible. They tried to make their emotions visual. 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

There are no verbs in this poem, and emotions are conveyed only by nouns. We can see this movement they tried to create in Ezra Pound’s poetry. In Ezra Pound’s era, societies were worn down by war, both psychologically and physically. The impact of war and innovations has individualized people. Society started to look at events subjectively rather than objectively. If we look at the poem, we can think that the loneliness that arises with modernism is reflected in people’s faces. The word “apparition” means to appear suddenly or appear ghostly. Using this word, the poet may have conveyed that the faces he saw in the metro station were now foreign and diversified.

The location is the metro station which means we have a dark moment, depressive environment. We can infer his or other people's longing for nature from the second line. He likens the faces to flowers on a branch. People at that time were constantly changing just like nature. A flower on a wet branch may change by fruiting or die on a black branch darkened by industry. We do not know how the poet sees the faces in the crowd. Is it while sitting in the metro or while waiting for the metro? Or is he just observing around? No matter how he saw it, we know that the faces appear and disappear. Just as the flowers on the branch will fade away one day, people’s faces will fade away too.