In a Station of the Metro: Is Two Sentences a Poem?

The Poem “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound is the epitome of brevity when it comes to poetry. I would link you to the poem like I usually do but let me just do it like this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

That’s it. That’s the poem. Now I’m not much of an Ezra pound fan but I fell in love with this poem when I read it for class my junior year of high school. After reading this poem I was opened up to a wider range of potential for poetry. I didn’t know breaking form like this was an option. I thought poems needed to be long and have interconnected ideas to be real poems. But this poem proved to me that that is not the case at all. 

This poem is so simple and so beautiful. The first line faces the reader with a scene and the second compares the scene to some elegant and pretty part of nature. Of course punctuation is everything here because we have so little to work with; we only can understand this reading to be the case because of the colon after the first line. Without that bit of punctuation we would be totally lost and the poem would become clunky and unclear. 

The mystery of the scene is interesting to me because it creates the same feeling for the reader as it must have created for whoever it was that actually saw this scene play out. At first they don’t totally understand what they are seeing, but eventually they realize the beauty that is laid out before them. That is why the comparison to the image is necessary in this piece. Without it the reader never understands the point of the poem. If we just had the first sentence broken up into two lines we would be lost in a scene of uncertainty and nothing in the poem would mean anything. The meaning of the poem is contingent on these sentences being placed side by side. 

A note from pound himself makes this reading very potent. I won’t quote the whole note but what Pound had said was that he got off a metro train in Paris and began to see one beautiful face after another and he could not, for the life of him, figure out how to articulate what he felt in the moment until he wrote this poem.

I think this poem is the perfect summation of Pound’s experience getting off that Parisian train. There was nothing better he could have said. No word, punctuation,or image he could have added to better explain what he felt that day. That is the power of poetry. It gives people the ability to explain things that they have no other way to express.