Blog Post #2 Topic #2 Amy Joo

In a short poem called “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound conforms to the Imagist manifesto by using the direct and unornamented language and by organizing the lines in a free verse.

With the use of the direct and unornamented language, Pound displays the setting of the poem and the objects he sees there. Thus, we can see that the poem will be about the narrator’s perspectives on a station of the Metro just through the title itself, and looking at the first line, we can directly picture a crowd of people using the transportation. The first word, “the apparition” (Pound) means the act of appearing. Solely the faces in the crowd, instead of the whole bodies, are in the process of being seen. Because the narrator is illustrating a big crowd of moving faces and stations of the Metro are the places where we get onto the Metro, we conclude that the narrator is in a moving object as well, most likely in a Metro. Thus, inside the Metro that is currently passing a station, the narrator sees a crowd of people busily walking towards or out of trains through the window. This is because generally the only part of the people we can easily notice out of windows is the face. Also, in the next sentence, he describes the petals on the bough. Just like the illustration of the faces from the perspective of the narrator looking at the station from a train window, only thing he can see is a quarter of a tree. The petals which are located at the similar height of a person are the “faces” of the trees, thereby proving that the narrator can see only a certain part of everything in the station and clarifying that the writing is based on his reflection upon what he sees through the Metro window. Thus, Pound’s concise language, carefully displaying the Imagist manifesto, allowed us to easily imagine the setting and the objects the main character witnesses.

Pound writes in free verse, instead of following certain rhymes and rhythms, in order to unornamentedly display the condition of the station of the Metro. With the shift in the line, Pound moves onto another object he sees from the window on the train. Pound depicts this in free verse in order to merely differentiate the objects that he notices in the station. In spite of focusing on ornamented language such as rhyming the poem with fixed forms and of implementing rhythms, he cuts the lines into two in order to feature a contrast between the two different types of “faces” the narrator sees from the outside of the train. He sees the passing faces of the people at the station and those of the trees. Therefore, the shift was deliberately used to represent a division in the objects rather than to show rhyme or rhythm in the poem, and his unique reason showed his conforming belief to the Imagist manifesto.

When we analyze the poem as a whole, we can imagine the busily moving big crowd of people and the wet petals.  The two combined objects also show that the poem is based on a morning on weekdays. A big number of people are constantly appearing, and the petals on the branches are still wet. Therefore, the people are most likely employees who work from 9 AM to 5 PM, and the water on the petals are dews formed in the early morning. By directly listing out what he sees in a station of the Metro, Pound clearly conforms to the Imagist manifesto. As the audience, we can depict the objects he sees in the station and imagine the place where he is seeing these objects from clearly due to his concise language and the use of free verse.

Word Count: 672