Blog Post #1: "In a Station of the Metro"

Ariana Green

Mrs. Fountain

ENL 10C, Spring Quarter

16 April 2018

Blog Post #1 (Prompt 2)

            Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro displays a scene where the narrator is among a crowd of people in a station and he or she notices many people that have a ghost like resemblance pass by. The ghostliness of these people suggest that the narrator is seeing people that have close resemblance of someone he or she once knew. The comparison between people to petals on a wet, black tree concludes that this person the narrator is seeing is dead or is dying. Through the use of diction the poem depicts the mental state of someone who is undergoing loss. Also, the diction and structure of the poem causes the poem to be vague and open to interpretation, which deviates from the Imagist manifesto.

The dark imagery, which is curated by the author’s diction, suggests that the narrator is trying to mentally process or heal from the loss of someone close to him. The word apparition refers to a ghost, phantom, or a spirit. The narrator is seeing a ghost (of all things) among a crowd of people, which can only mean he is remembering the dead, and the dead is closely personal to the narrator. Furthermore, the words these faces is referring to more than one person. This can mean two things, the narrator has lost multiple people in his or her life or he or she is continuously seeing the same ghostlike face of their deceased loved one in many people. The word choice depicts the mental state of the narrator. To see the same face on multiple, random people going by conveys that the narrator is only thinking of one thing, and his grieving process consists of constant chaos of reputation.

In addition, the diction used in the comparison, such as petals and black further emphasize the narrator’s singling out people among the crowd, just as if they were petals from a flower. Then to use the color black, which represents death and chaos, illustrates the death of these petals, since they are described as being connected to the black tree. The comparison also represents the chaotic mental state of the narrator. The petals are representative of the people and the chaos is representative of the narrator’s internal thoughts. The narrator’s mental state produces the dark and ghostlike imagery of the people around him or her, which comments on the way the narrator observes the world. Seeing the world in such a negative manner could only mean that there is negativity in the narrator’s own life, therefore going back into the cycle of deucing that this poem is about loss. Overall, the impactful diction utilizes Pound’s metro scene to show the mental state of the narrator.

The Imagist manifesto specifies that poetry should, “employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word” (Amy Lowell).  In other words, diction should be straightforward and not have double meaning. Pound’s poem does the exact opposite. The diction he uses is open to many kinds of interpretation; one being that the color black is symbolic for the death of a loved one, which is causing the narrator to have a chaotic mindset. The open-ended interpretations of what exactly is the author saying, which can be judged by the words he uses, goes against the first rule of the Imagist manifesto. The poem does not specify or go into great detail of the symbolism or meaning behind the words, so the audience has to use their own analysis to interpret the text. Therefore, making the language uncommon and the words decorative because everyone can have a different understanding of the poem.

Lastly, the structure of the poem adds to the questionable meaning of this piece of work. The length and the line break, as well as the punctuation is a significant role that goes against law five of the Imagist manifesto. The law being that poetry should be, “never blurred nor indefinite” (Lowell). However, the short length of the poem makes it more vague and the interpretations indefinite, since the reader has only a sentence to analyze. The line break separates the narrator’s thoughts of the people to a symbolic comparison. This separation, which is also separated by a semicolon, further explores the analysis of this poem, once again blurring the meaning of this work. The poem does follow the other laws, but still does not fit the entirety of the Imagist manifesto.