Why do I love being an English major?
This is why, I can write crap like this in the middle of the night, turn it in, and get away with it.

Phenomenological reading of Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro'

Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' offers a precise use of language to create meaning out of a compact but vague metaphor. The full text reads,

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The poem contains more gaps than not gaps, and as such, it derives its content from the reader's interaction with those gaps.

If one begins reading with only the first line “The apparition of these faces in the crowd;” a very funny thing begins to happen. The first two words, “The apparition,” create a feeling of fuzzy perception, perhaps one of disbelief of ones own senses. The concept of an apparition is akin to the seeing of a ghost, evoking anxiety as a response to the experience of this apparition. Also, the use of apparition, barring its supernatural implications, functions simply to represent the experience of having this scene appear from nothing, or make itself apparent, as well as to create a vacancy for the reader to fill. As witnesses to an apparition, we are not part of the scene, we are physically and emotionally removed from it. The use of apparition in all of its forms creates for the reader an experience of being in the metro station, stifled with heat and steam and smoke, such that the faces in the crowd are hard to discern due to humidity gradually dispersing in the air, and the fogging of glasses.

If we add in the rest of the line in order to have “The apparition of these faces in the crowd;” an interesting thing occurs. Instead of experiencing a single apparition, we are experiencing “these faces.” The singular apparition becomes one that embodies many discrete entities within it. It is a singular experience of a plural. This inconsistency increases the reader's anxiety. It is expected that the line would read, “the apparition of the faces in the crowd,” but now, with the newfound individuality within the apparition, not only is the reader removed from the scene, but removed from his or her common understanding of what the scene would be. This use of language evokes the anxiety of the apparition itself by bringing the reader to question his or her perception.

What follows this is a semicolon. This semicolon creates the metaphor. It states that the thought that follows is related or is a reiteration of the previous. By using the semicolon, Pound avoids cluttering his poem with the word “is” or “are”, depending on whether he feels he is referring to the singular apparition or the plural faces, and allows the conflict to remain unresolved until the following line.

“Petals on a wet, black bough.” Initially, the word “Petals” can strike one as odd. “Petals” implies flowers, which implies individuality and natural beauty, an unfitting image given the marginalization of the individuals as just “faces in the crowd.” However, these petals are not flowers, they are simply petals. Petals only exist as petals when removed from the whole of the flower, having fallen to the floor or having been picked off. “[T]hese faces” are fallen from flowers and stick to the “wet, black bough.” Now again, it is one thing for a bough to be wet, but it only becomes black when the moisture has exhausted its sap and it lies dead on the forest floor, soaking through the wood. Taken as a complete image, the stifling atmosphere of the metro is described, which strengthens the image of the mist of the apparition. The people are soaked, and not getting any dryer in the humidity of the station. The image also reconciles the conflict between the singular and the plural. In the second line, the places are reversed with the singular preceding the plural, but the anxiety is eased when “these faces” are gummed together on a single “black bough” and can be unified by something more tangible than their presence in a single scene. They are all fallen to the underground, stuck together on the grimy tile of the station. Dead bits of nature stuck to more dead bits of nature.