In a Station of the Metro: Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Ephemerality of Experience

A key theme in Pound’s poem relates to the ephemerality, or short-lived quality, of experience. Although the speaker doesn’t invoke this theme in a direct way, the poem conjures it indirectly on the level of form. Pound considered “In a Station of the Metro” to be an example of Imagist poetry, which was an experimental form that sought to isolate and record a single image or moment with as much precision as possible. Imagist poems therefore sought to wrest individual experiences from the otherwise unceasing passage of time. That is, they stopped time in order to consider the unique form and intensity of a given instant. Pound achieves this sense of stopped time by neglecting to use any verbs, giving the poem a quality of existing outside time’s flow. But timelessness doesn’t imply infinite time. On the contrary, it serves as a powerful reminder that, in ordinary life, we cannot simply stop time. Whereas we can use poetry and other forms of art to slow down and reflect on our experiences, the experiences themselves are ephemeral and forever passing on. The poem’s setting in a metro station further echoes the unceasing nature of time’s passage.

The Subjective Nature of Perception

“In a Station of the Metro” explores the relationship between the subjective nature of perception and the objective nature of material reality. Ultimately, Pound is more interested in subjectivity than objectivity, which the poem itself makes abundantly clear. If Pound were interested in recording the concrete actuality of a particular experience, he could have relied entirely on description. Admittedly, he does use something like pure description in the poem’s second line: “Petals on a wet, black bough.” But two observations disrupt the apparent purity of this description. First, the opening line emphasizes an immaterial aspect of experience. The speaker doesn’t simply see faces in the crowd. The point is that those faces appear as something other than mere faces—they are apparitions. Second, the poem’s two lines are connected by a figurative logic rather than a literal one. Something about the apparition-like faces of people in the crowd reminds the speaker of petals. What results is the superposition of one image on top of another. In fashioning this overlap, Pound suggests that the so-called “objective” world doesn’t present itself to us in a straightforward way. Indeed, it’s always experienced through the filter of an individual’s subjective experience.