The tone of “In a Station of the Metro” might be best described in terms of astonishment. In its modern usage, the verb astonish means “to give a shock of wonder by the presentation of something unlooked for or unaccountable” (Oxford English Dictionary). As the phrase “shock of wonder” implies, astonishment has a generally positive connotation. Although a shock is startling by definition, it isn’t terrifying in the way, say, a horror film is terrifying. And in the case of astonishment, the startling quality of the shock quickly passes into a sense of wonder and appreciation. Such a scenario nicely describes what’s going on in “In a Station of the Metro,” which documents a moment of wonder that arises following a subtle shock. This subtle shock occurs when the faces in a crowd appear to the speaker not just as a group of people but as an “apparition,” a word that suggests an immaterial, even supernatural presence. The speaker’s astonishment at the apparition-like faces is enhanced by the poem’s lack of verbs. Without verbs, the moment documented in the poem seems to stand still, reduced to the material concreteness of brute reality. This concreteness further reflects the original meaning of astonish: “to turn to stone.”