Next

“In a Station of the Metro” announces its setting in the title. That is, the poem recounts an experience the speaker had while passing through a metro station. Pound reported that the poem specifically concerns a moment of clarity he experienced in 1912 at a station of the Paris Metro called La Concorde. However, the speaker doesn’t offer any details about which station or even which city their experience occurred in. Nor does the speaker clarify who they are or where they’re going. All we know is that they’re passing through as they travel from one place to another. This fact is significant in itself, since it echoes one of the poem’s key themes related to the ephemerality of experience. The speaker has conjured these two lines in an effort briefly to arrest time and record the concrete particularity of an instant. But though they have used poetry to isolate a moment, in reality time kept passing, dissolving the moment being described back into the flow of experience. Thus, in using an image to effectively stop time, the speaker implicitly contends with the fact that we are all inevitably passengers in time’s flow—just as the speaker is a passenger on the Paris Metro.

Next section Themes

Take a Study Break