“In a Station of the Metro” captures a fleeting moment of perceptual intensity that Ezra Pound experienced at the Concorde station of the Paris Metro in 1912. When this poem first appeared, it provided a chief example of an experimental new form of poetry known as “Imagism.” This form of poetry drew inspiration from the Japanese poetic form known as haiku, which emphasized linguistic compression and concrete imagery. To write the poem, Pound started with thirty lines of verse. He then meticulously cut the poem down until he had eventually reduced it to the two-line, fourteen-word poem we have today. The first line of Pound’s radically compressed poem evokes the astonishing moment when faces in a crowd of travelers suddenly appeared to the speaker like an “apparition.” The second line implicitly compares these apparition-like faces to “petals on a wet, black bough.” The whole poem turns on the logic that links the first line to the second and suggests—though without explicitly saying so—that the faces are like petals. Despite its apparent simplicity, the poem is surprisingly complex in the way it raises questions about the ephemeral nature of experience and the subjective nature of perception.

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