When we are trying to interpret “In a station of the metro”, it is wise to analyze the historical background at that time. This short poem was written in 1913 by Ezra Pound; it was considered as a typical imagist poem. The word “imagism” refers to a genre which focuses on the inner world of the author; the poem would always have a strong sense of imagery, like watching a painting. Also, there are usually a lot of metaphors in the text.
In this poem, the author mentioned four objectives: apparition, faces, crowd, petals and bough. It is easy to find that “faces in the crowd” is related to “petals on a bough”. The word “apparition” might be used to describe to the discordance between the “bough” and “petals”. Pound was trying to create a gloomy and dark atmosphere in the subway station after the rain, but he found a lot of young and beautiful faces coming out from the darkness. This strong contrast between the gloomy atmosphere and the living faces makes Pound feel a sense of unreal, thus he would use the word “apparition” to describe this kind of dream-like state.
One of the features of this poem is its extremely short length. According to Pound, the first draft was about 30 lines long, and then he deleted half of it and reduced the length to 14 lines. In the published version the length is only 2 lines, which kind of increases the difficulty of interpretation. In my opinion, the sentence rhythm is short and choppy in order to create a clear and concise structure. However, considering there are only two lines in this poem, there is nothing much to talk about the sentence rhythm because the length is just too short.
The author aims to use the minimum words to express the maximum prospect, and that is one feature of imagism; thus there are a lot of blank spaces in this poem. For example, we do not know directly from the text that what those faces look like, what the surrounding environment is, what the atmosphere is. Those settings are important in literature but in this poem we can only imagine about those settings. I guess this is the trait of imagism: the author would intentionally leave a lot of blank in the poem, and these blanks are left for us to imagine. I would expect the author to say that although the atmosphere might be dark and lifeless, as long as we have those kids, we will have the future. These beautiful faces are like flowers on the bough, bringing light and hope to us. The purpose of this poem is to tell readers that although life might be painful, the hope always exists. Hope can make lives strong; hope can enable old boughs to have blossoms growing on them.
The general flow of this post has some issues. It feels like a lot of the sentences end far to abruptly with those of the opening paragraph being some of the worst offenders. If some of the semicolons and periods were removed and if the sentences were allowed to interact with each more, this post would be much easier to read. Your insight about how the contrast between the living faces and the gloomy atmosphere gives the reader a sense of the unreal, though, was very interesting and extremely well thought out.
ReplyDeleteI like some of your interpretations, especially that it was raining in the scene. But I couldn't distinguish your understanding and the facts that you found, which is a little frustrated. I understand that interpreting such a short poem is hard, but I expect you to look closer to the text. You mentioned that the poem is extremely short, so it would be essential to talk about the dictions.
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