Creative Response: Imagery Analysis of Pound's 'Metro' Poem

This creative project provides an analysis of Ezra Pound's poem 'In a Station of the Metro' through a creative medium, focusing on the element of imagery. The analysis interprets Pound's use of juxtaposing urban life with nature, particularly comparing the faces in a metro station to petals on a wet, black bough. The project explores how Pound uses imagery to convey the fragility and brevity of life, contrasting the transient nature of people in the metro with the cyclical nature of petals on a tree. The project emphasizes Pound's technique of merging images with minimal words and punctuation, reflecting on the melancholy tone and the impermanence inherent in the poem's imagery. It connects the man-made metropolis with the natural world, highlighting the poem's central theme of imagery and its impact on the reader's understanding of the human condition.

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Author Note

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“In a Station of the Metro” is considered to be one of the best works of Ezra Pound.
Written in the year of 1913, Pound explains the entire manifesto towards Imagism through his
vivid poetry that is called by many critics, a dry yet classical verse. The analysis of the poem can
be understood from the reflection of the speaker who in an underground station in Paris and he
observes the faces of the people in the crowd as if they were a ‘wet, black bough’ from a tree.
The poem adds or rather subtracts too much details and the reader is left with questions of the
urban world of Paris Metro that is contrasted with the nature where leaves and tree boughs exist.
Pound uses the Japanese style known as haiku that uses images from nature to contrast the
transcendent with momentary and timeless miniatures (Singh). The concept of people is like
petals that would suggest their fragility and the brevity. Pound stays within the memory or partly
due to the frailty of the image that shows petals on a bough would not stay forever just like the
scene in the metro where many years from now the people will change and the same faces will
not exist (Flack and Culligan). Another aspect of Pound’s imagery shows that his relation draws
no straight line not any kind of metaphor. What is uses here is punctuations to merge images
with as few words as possible. This involves many techniques such as juxtaposing, that is
placing by the side or on top on one another. Pound uses the typography and punctuations to
move from one stanza to the other. This is a very hard technique for many poets however Pound
is able to present this manner of imagery to convey the immediacy of analogy.
Therefore what I understood from the poem is that Pound’s main idea is to compare or
rather show the similarities between the urban life and nature. The way he has presented the
metro station with that of the nature explains what is a simple description of vantage point in
station with different people is contrasted with the imagery of nature where just like the station;
the inhabitants of nature are also busy (Hamilton). What I understood is that the dark platform of

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the subway and its people are just like the petals of a flower hanging from tree branch in a
stormy night. In the image given below, I found that by connecting the image of petals, Pound
was able to show by contrasting the petals and boughs to humanity (Wilson). The picture links
the man-made metropolis with that of the natural system of nature which acts as the central
theme towards imagery. The use of impermanence in the image presented an idea within the
poem which I found to be a melancholy based tone. I found this picture to be very contemplating
as if Pound is mocking the fragility of life. I was able to see that this image connects Pound’s
narrative though a short glimpse of the metro door where the people of the city would be in the
same instant. The petals would look the same when the rain would fall, and when winter will
come, the petals would fall in in their place, and new ones would grow. The rain itself is
contrasted to the cycle of time and through this the whole chain is repeated. “In a Station of the
Metro” encapsulates the main idea in contrast to the Imagist presentation. I found that Pound has
defined image as a platform of intellectual and emotional complex that is presented in the poem.

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REFERENCES
Flack, Leah Culligan. Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of HD, James Joyce, Osip
Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Hamilton, Scott. Ezra Pound and the symbolist inheritance. Vol. 195. Princeton University
Press, 2014.
Singh, Ghan. Ezra Pound as Critic. Springer, 2016.
Wilson, Peter. A Preface to Ezra Pound. Routledge, 2014.