Blog Post #1 - "In a Station of the Metro" & Imagism

Caitlyn Liu
Professor Aimee Fountain
ENL 10C
16 April 2018
Word Count: 792

"In a Station of the Metro" & Imagism

          Written in 1913, Ezra Pound’s infamous two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro” is catalytically involved in the revolutionary poetry movement of Imagism. The poem reads, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough”. In Amy Lowell’s 1917 essay, “On Imagism,” she gives six “rules” of Imagism poetry. Briefly, they are to use exact language, “create new rhythms”, “allow absolute freedom”, “present an image”, produce “hard and clear” poetry, and have concentration. Pound’s poem conforms to the Imagist manifesto because the simple form and diction produce a complex presentation of the process of death.

            Taking full advantage of the “absolute freedom in choice of subject,” Pound chooses to write about death, a heavy topic, in a metaphorical mundane setting to make it more palatable to readers. Upon the first read, one may think that this is just a poem about a metro station. When taking a closer look at the second line, the word “wet” is not a typical way to describe a “bough”. A bough is the main tree branch, typically a large tubular structure, just like how a metro station is shaped. Right before death, one experiences terminal secretions, colloquially known as “death rattles”, where fluid builds up in the main tubular structures of the human respiratory system. The secretions that block the throat are like the “faces” that crowd the metro station. One can see that after elaborate analysis, each word in the poem serves a grand purpose that contributes to a more complex theme.

            In a two-line poem, Pound does not have the room for words that do not serve a purpose. The title of the poem serves as a supplemental line of poetry that can be counted as an additional third line. Pound “use[s] [the] language of common speech” and “employ[s] always the exact word” that has multiple meanings to convey the stillness that accompanies death. The title contains the word “station,” which can simply mean an underground “station” where a train loads and unloads passengers, but according to the OED, the etymology of “station” comes from the Middle French word estacion which means a “state of stopping of standing still”. When one is dead, they lay still underground, completely opposite of the typical energy of a metro station. A metro station is fast-paced—trains are leaving as quickly as they arrive and there is a constant shuffling of the different people that occupy the space within a metro station. The rapid movement of the faces in the metro is like how one’s “life flashes before their eyes” right before death. These are just one of the images Pound creates with his layered diction.

            Pound “create[s] new rhythms” and “presents an image” with the minimalistic format of his poem to simulate the structure of life itself. The entire poem can be read as one sentence, which is symbolic of the one life that humans have. A life begins when the sentence begins and deceases with a period at the end. It takes a short amount of time to read the poem which produces the effect of time passing by quickly in the short span of life. When reading the poem, the reader would pause at the semi-colon that marks the end of the first line. A semi-colon is symbolic of a sentence that has not quite ended yet, which can depict an image of the limbo between life and death. The last three words of the poem, “wet, black bough” can be read in the rhythm of a final heartbeat before someone dies. The comma after “wet” is an indication of a human life pausing, trying to hold on, before ultimately being defeated by death.

            Pound embraces Lowell’s last two rules of imagism because of the lack of decorative literary devices and punctuation. Lowell writes that “although so much Imagist poetry is metaphorical, similes are sparingly used”. “In a Station of the Metro” contains no similes, but more importantly, no ornamental fluff that does not purposely contribute to present a “hard and clear” image of death as a process. The words “life” and “death” do not appear once in the poem, for a good Imagist “…does not refer to subject but to the rendering of subject”. As an Imagist, Pound is familiar with “remain[ing] concentrated on the subject, and know[ing] when to stop,” as the last rule of Imagism states. Pound ends the one-sentence-long poem with a period, showing the finality of death. Humans only get one life—therefore, a one-sentence poem for the span of one human life.

            While many examples of exceptional literature break the rules, following Lowell’s six rules of Imagism allows Pound to create a timeless poem that wows readers with its minimalistic mystique.

Works Cited

"station, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2018,

www.oed.com/view/Entry/189294. Accessed 14 April 2018.