The speaker of “In a Station of the Metro” reveals virtually nothing about themself. Some critics have identified Pound as the speaker, since we know the poet wrote this poem in response to an experience he had in a Paris Metro station. However, the actual text of the poem doesn’t reveal any concrete details about the speaker. Indeed, one of the poem’s most noteworthy aspects is the way the speaker seems oddly removed from it. This sense of removal emerges because of the way Pound has stripped away all unnecessary language. For instance, there isn’t a verb anywhere in the poem, which means that each of the poem’s two lines constitute a sentence fragment. More relevant to the issue of the speaker, however, is the fact that the poem doesn’t have a grammatical subject. Although presumably there is some individual whose experience is being communicated in the poem, there is no “I.” Instead, the speaker is all eyes. That is, the poem reduces the speaker’s experience down to the barest element of visual perception. With no subject and no verb, the poem is all about the objects the speaker sees. The speaker themself recedes into the background.

Although Pound has radically reduced the status of the speaker’s subjectivity, that doesn’t mean that the speaker has entirely vacated the poem. If the speaker is to be found anywhere in the poem, it’s in the fragmentary logic that connects the first line to the second. The speaker has attempted to arrest time by isolating a particular moment of experience and presenting it as concretely as possible. But despite this attempt to stop time, the poem itself still unfolds in time and develops a logic that’s unique to the speaker’s experience. According to this logic, the “apparition of . . . faces in the crowd” somehow resembles “Petals on a wet, black bough.” Some kind of thinking and perceiving person is making this equivalence, and even though they seem absent from the poem, that person is none other than the speaker. Furthermore, however concrete the speaker’s use of language might be, it still contains the kind of abstraction associated with figurative language. Specifically, by equating faces with petals, the speaker constructs a metaphor. A figurative association of this type implies the presence of a thinking and feeling subject who’s more than just a pair of eyes recording raw visual data.