Appreciation of Ezra Pound’s “in a Station of the Metro”
Appreciation of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”
In a Station of the Metro is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris’s subway station in which the faces turned variously toward light and darkness. The poet, Ezra Pound, was famous for advocating free meter and a more economical use of words and images in poetic expression. He is also one of the leaders of the Imagist Movement of poetry. He advocated to use sharp, accurate, implicative and concise images to express concrete things, and this "in a metro station", written in 1913, is always acknowledged as the best imagist poem.
Someone says, "It is difficult to get a thorough understanding of this poem”. That makes sense. Poetry is neither the objective phenomenon of mechanical reflection, nor directly let the subjective feelings overflow from literal. It is just because poetry has the characteristics of writing the minds, therefore viewers are required to use the method of imagination and association to mobilize their feelings to understand, feel, taste the poem, so as to result in a strong resonance, which is the "re-creation" of poetry.
This poem is in a succinct style which just has 14 words in the whole poem. However, the images in this poem give us the interior meaning. The images are apparition, faces, petals and bough. He uses two lines to describe a vivid picture for us. The first line is narration and the second is expression. What does the apparition mean? One is suddenly appear and the other is“something like the ghost”. This word nicely captures the immediate impression left on the poet’s mind and the powerful emotional impact he felt in that situation. Its association with ghosts also invokes a vivid view of the people coming out of the dark Metro as if they are specters ascending from the underground world. We can easily touch that the faces in the subway are depressed. At this time, Pound saw a child’s lovely face, and then another. All the world seems changed. The
In a Station of the Metro is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris’s subway station in which the faces turned variously toward light and darkness. The poet, Ezra Pound, was famous for advocating free meter and a more economical use of words and images in poetic expression. He is also one of the leaders of the Imagist Movement of poetry. He advocated to use sharp, accurate, implicative and concise images to express concrete things, and this "in a metro station", written in 1913, is always acknowledged as the best imagist poem.
Someone says, "It is difficult to get a thorough understanding of this poem”. That makes sense. Poetry is neither the objective phenomenon of mechanical reflection, nor directly let the subjective feelings overflow from literal. It is just because poetry has the characteristics of writing the minds, therefore viewers are required to use the method of imagination and association to mobilize their feelings to understand, feel, taste the poem, so as to result in a strong resonance, which is the "re-creation" of poetry.
This poem is in a succinct style which just has 14 words in the whole poem. However, the images in this poem give us the interior meaning. The images are apparition, faces, petals and bough. He uses two lines to describe a vivid picture for us. The first line is narration and the second is expression. What does the apparition mean? One is suddenly appear and the other is“something like the ghost”. This word nicely captures the immediate impression left on the poet’s mind and the powerful emotional impact he felt in that situation. Its association with ghosts also invokes a vivid view of the people coming out of the dark Metro as if they are specters ascending from the underground world. We can easily touch that the faces in the subway are depressed. At this time, Pound saw a child’s lovely face, and then another. All the world seems changed. The