The Full Text of “In a Station of the Metro”
1The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
2Petals on a wet, black bough.
The Full Text of “In a Station of the Metro”
1The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
2Petals on a wet, black bough.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Introduction
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"In a Station of the Metro" is a poem by American writer Ezra Pound, originally published in 1913. Pound's two-line poem is a famous example of "imagism," a poetic form spear-headed by Pound that focuses above all on relating clear images through precise, accessible language. In just 20 words (including the title!), this poem manages to vividly evoke both a crowded subway station and petals on a tree branch. By juxtaposing these two very different images, the poem blurs the line between the speaker's reality and imagination and invites the reader to relate urban life to the natural world—and to perhaps consider each of these realms in a new light.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Summary
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Seeing all these people's faces pass by in a crowded subway station brings to mind the image of petals on a wet, black tree branch.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Themes
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Perception, Imagination, and Reality
“In a Station of the Metro” is concerned above all with imagery: the speaker sees a bunch of people in a subway station and this prompts the speaker to envision petals on a tree branch. This shift is remarkably sudden: in just two lines—a fleeting instant—the speaker sees both petals and a crowd of faces, and manages to vividly convey both images to the reader.
The poem's brief form allows it to combine both forms of perception (one happening before the speaker’s eyes, and one happening in their mind), creating a new, blended reality from the speaker's point of view. Overall, then, the poem might be thought of as an attempt to capture the connection between sight and imagination—revealing how these two processes together shape people's perception of the world around them.
Pound strips the poem of all superfluous language. Including the title, the poem uses just 20 words—meaning there is nothing to focus on besides the pair of images and how they relate to each other. The poem’s structure thus allows for a clear association between the what the speaker sees (“faces in the crowd”) and what the speaker imagines in response (“petals on a wet, black bough”).
The poem also notably doesn't use any verbs. Instead, it is isolated to the rawest, most basic descriptions of images, which contribute to the spontaneity of the speaker’s visual association. In other words, the poem seems to catch the speaker in the act of visually processing a connection between “faces” and “petals” before the speaker even has time to form a complete thought! This verbless quickening creates a mingling between the two images as though the speaker sees “faces” and “petals” at the same time, or perhaps in oscillation.
A close reading of the poem's language further reveals how the “apparition of these faces in the crowd” could indeed look like “petals on a wet, black, bough.” The word “apparition” could simply suggest the act of appearing, or it could denote something “ghostly.” The “faces” are certainly appearing before the speaker, but there is also a ghostly—or at least blurry—quality to a big crowd of people standing in a dimly-lit metro station. Readers can imagine, then, how the blurred, partially-obscured “faces” might have led the speaker to see something else.
“Faces” in a “crowd” may be different from “petals” on a “bough,” but the poem suggests that they are each visual fixtures of similar spaces. In a metro station, crowds line up on either side of a long train track just as petals stem from either side of a branch. The words “crowd” and “bough” even share assonance, which invites such a visual comparison between their shapes.
Furthermore, the adjectives modifying “bough” (“wet” and “black”) could also describe the metro station itself: “black” may be appropriate given the station’s dark, underground setting, while “wet” could describe the shimmering metal of the train and its tracks, or even leftover rain on pedestrians’ jackets.
Although readers are left to wonder why the speaker draws a visual link between “faces” and “petals,” the poem is not concerned with explaining anything about the speaker or their circumstances. Rather, it is a poem that portrays the instantaneous connection between eye and brain as an association sparks from an image, perhaps celebrating the sudden artistry of this imaginative process.
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Urban Life and the Natural World
Pound was a champion of a technique called "imagism," which is more concerned with conveying images in clear, vivid prose than with following any particular poetic form. As such, part of the "point," as it were, of a poem like "In a Station of the Metro" is simply to paint a picture for the reader. Much of the wonder of this particular poem is the way in which the two images presented contrast with and complement each other, helping the reader "see" these very different objects—a subway station and a wet tree branch—in a new or different way.
Taken on a symbolic level, the poem seems to be juxtaposing two normally opposing realms: that of urban life and that of the natural world. This might be highlighting just how different the human-made world is from the natural world by putting them in such close proximity, or it might be highlighting each's (somewhat unintuitive) similarity. Of course, the poem could also be doing both!
The word "apparition" is especially important in assessing the similarity or difference between the images in the first and second lines. On one hand, this word could suggest a distraction. The "apparition," or the ghostly, blurred appearance of many people in a crowd, might be so dull and homogenous an image that the speaker's brain turns instead to petals. In other words, all the people rush by so quickly that their faces become indistinguishable from one another, and the speaker becomes distracted, thinking instead of the loveliness of nature.
Indeed, this depiction of a relatively peaceful and elegant part of the natural world would seem a welcoming change from a noisy, crowded metro station. The speaker could also be suggesting that nature is worth prioritizing, or at least thinking about, in a world increasingly consumed by technology. Perhaps the speaker is thinking about how the metro station has displaced what might have once been a forest, swapping out trees for a hurried mass of people and the loud, dirty trains.
Of course, the poem is just as likely doing the opposite: implying that the world of human beings isn't all that distant from nature, and is in fact an extension of the natural world. Note that "apparition" also implies a kind of visual dissolving of one image into another. Under this interpretation, the ghostly faces in a metro station, lining up on either side of a track, dissolve in the speaker's mind into the image of petals hanging on either side of a branch.
In this reading, the city itself could be thought of as a tree, with each metro station representing different "boughs" of that tree and people representing the tree's leaves. The metro nourishes various parts of the city—allowing transportation of people and goods—just as a tree's branches carry water to its many leaves.
What's more, both images convey a sense of temporality, since neither is static. In the first, people are traveling from one destination to the next; whatever "faces" appear in the crowd will be replaced by new commuters soon enough. In the second, the tree is wet—likely from rain—and will ostensibly dry, while its petals will eventually fall and be replaced by new ones. In a way, then, this pair of images could suggest everything from the fleeting quality of the moment to the cyclicality of life itself.
Pound may thus be suggesting that despite their obvious differences, urban life and the natural world follow the same universal laws. Or, to go a step further, perhaps urban life, being relatively modern, cannot help but mimic the older, established form of nature.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “In a Station of the Metro”
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Line 1
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
The title helps readers understand what's happening here: the speaker is in a crowded subway station, where people appear like "apparitions"—or ghostly, fleeting images—as they pass by.
On the one hand, this line seems pretty simple: with so many people walking by, one face after another pops up in the speaker's field of vision. Yet the word "apparition" gives these faces a supernatural, ethereal quality, as if the speaker isn't quite sure if these people even exist. Thanks to the poem's title, readers can assume that the speaker's crowded surroundings are indeed real, even though something else will take those surroundings' place in the following line. "Apparition" also suggests something momentary—that the faces pop up in the speaker's field of vision and just as quickly disappear.
The word "faces" stands also stands out. Pound could have used "people," or otherwise drawn attention to entire bodies rather than just faces. The word "faces," however, accentuates the degree of monotony and blurriness in the image of the crowd.
Think about it this way: people's faces are usually their most distinguishing characteristic, or the primary way that people tell one human being from another. If, in this metro station, everyone's face shares the quality of an "apparition," then the speaker has detached themselves from the scene by describing other people as such. The speaker seems to view the crowd as one ghostly body, not caring to pay attention to its many details. This distancing also paves the way for the seemingly abrupt transition in the next line, as though the speaker has already begun thinking about something else.
Read in a different way, the use of "apparition" suggests something deeply spiritual and moving about this crowd. The speaker is having a sort of vision or spiritual experience while looking out on all these people who pass before the speaker's field of view for just a moment. Perhaps this reflects the ultimate unknowability of other people, or the speaker's sensation of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of different lives rushing past in an instant.
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Line 2
Petals on a wet, black bough.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Consonance
This poem contains both alliteration and consonance, two related literary devices that allow its short form to link disparate images with sound. There are only a few instances of each, and they all occur in the poem's second line. Alliteration exists in the /b/ sound shared by "black" and "bough," while consonance exists in the /t/ sound shared by "Petals" and "wet" as well as in the /l/ sound shared by "Petals" and "black." In a poem this sort, the use of so many repeated sounds is no coincidence, but rather a deliberate choice on the part of the speaker.
For one thing, the insistence on the /l/ sound slows down the second line. Whereas in the first line the people's faces rush by so quickly that they seem like mere apparitions, in the second line it feels as though the speaker is really savoring this image of "petals on a wet black bough." The luxuriousness of the /l/ sound causes time to pause, in a way, as if the speaker has pressed a slow-motion button on the image before them.
These sonic resonances stand out not just for their appealing sound, but also for the fact that one line contains them while another does not. The lack of similarly resonant sonic devices in the first line might make the image of the crowded train station seem less beautiful or coordinated than the second line, which, by contrast, consists almost entirely of words that all sonically resonate with one another.
This disparity matches each line's content, the first portraying an image that is, after all, less beautiful and more hectic by representing a crowded metro station, while the second line shows a relatively orderly and peaceful glimpse into the natural world.
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Assonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Imagery
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Juxtaposition
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Parataxis
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Metaphor
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"In a Station of the Metro" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Metro
- Apparition
- Bough
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In this poem, "Metro" refers to the largely underground train system that's widely used in cities today. In other words, it's a subway station.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “In a Station of the Metro”
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Form
The poem is a prime example of imagism, which is poetry that rejects long, flowing poetic descriptions in favor of concise, precise images. For an imagist poet, the image itself, rather than the explanatory descriptions associated with that image, is the primary way of making meaning. Pound actually helped spearhead the imagist movement with poems like "In a Station of the Metro," and inspired many other poets in the early 20th-century to attempt the same.
The poem was originally published with large spaces between some words (see an image of it here). These spaces might be said to represent all that's missing from the poem—that is, all the words ultimately deemed unnecessary by Pound as he whittled the poem down to its shortest, most evocative form.
The poem's brevity and focus on a simple aspect of the natural world also make it feel pretty similar to a Japanese haiku, though it doesn't match this form exactly. Traditionally, haikus focus on a specific element of the natural world, using extremely concise and specific images to do so. The form of a haiku, even if it isn't perfectly resembled here, allows for the kind of brief pairing of images that Pound likely wanted in associating a metro station with petals on a bough. (It's perhaps worth noting that Pound took time to learn the poetic histories and tendencies of other parts of the world, including Japan, and was well aware of the haiku form.)
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Meter
This poem in written in free verse and does not have a clear, overarching meter. That said, each line does seem to be conscious of a kind of syllabic structure. The first line begins with iambs (unstressed-stressed), but is followed by irregular, mostly unstressed, beats:
The app- | ari- | tion of | these fa- | ces in | the crowd:
The second line might be read as featuring a trochee (stressed-unstressed), an anapest (unstressed-unstressed-stressed), and a spondee (stressed-stressed), which is a technical way of saying that most of this line's syllables are stressed in contrast to the first line:
Petals | on a wet, | black bough.
The quick, sharp syllables of the second line seem especially punctuated in contrast to the more regular meter of the first line. Perhaps this metrical variation is another technique of Pounds to make the second line stand out from the first, just as the natural element of its content ("Petals on a wet, black bough") stands out from the urban fixture of the metro station. In any case, the lack of a consistent overall meter reflects that this poem is more concerned with making a striking visual observation than with sticking to a particular form.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem does not have a rhyme scheme, although the two words that end each of its lines share clear assonance and are slant rhymes. The fact that these words ("crowd" and "bough") almost rhyme reflects the overall contrast between the two lines they inhabit.
The poem sets up a juxtaposition between two seemingly unlike things (faces in a crowd and petals on a tree branch), and simultaneously highlights those images' similarities and differences. This small bit of assonance further highlights that simultaneous similarity and difference. Each line ends with the same vowel sound, yet ultimately does not fully rhyme. In other words, each line sonically resonates with the other, but is not quite the same.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Speaker
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Many people have taken the speaker to be Pound himself, given that this poem was inspired by the poet's experience in a Paris metro station. That's a fair interpretation, but part of the poem's power comes from its focus entirely on the image before the speaker rather than on the speaker themselves.
As such, the actual poem does not reveal much about the personality of its speaker, although it does relay several important pieces of logistical information. First, the speaker is in a metro station, a fact that is made clear by the poem's title. The speaker is also likely in a "crowd" of people, and seems to be slightly detached from their surroundings given the use of the word "apparition," which imbues the crowd with a blurry, ghostly quality. Lastly, the speaker spontaneously imagines "petals on a wet, black bough" after observing the crowd, which suggests a certain affinity for the natural world, or perhaps simply the speaker's tendency to see nature's presence in unexpected places.
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“In a Station of the Metro” Setting
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The poem's title relays its exact setting: "In a Station of the Metro." By describing the setting in its title, the poem allows itself to be even more concise, sharing only the raw descriptions of images that arise from the speaker's mind while in this metro (that is, "subway") station. Though nothing within the poem itself makes this clear, Pound wrote "In a Station of the Metro" specifically about an experience he had in metro station in Paris in 1912.
This particular setting, which is likely dimly lit and full of noise, contrasts with the poem's second and final line: "Petals on a wet, black bough." A short description of a part of the natural world does not seem to belong "in a station of the metro," and yet the poem's crux is about defying expectation through an odd pairing of images. The speaker seems lost in the crowd, and, for some reason, can only think of petals on a bough.
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Literary and Historical Context of “In a Station of the Metro”
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Literary Context
Ezra Pound was the so-called "Father of Modernism," an early 20th-century movement that had a radical, non-conformist approach to literature. Most poems appearing in the 19th century or earlier were heavily structured, and almost always had a discernible rhyme scheme or meter. The modernists, however, wanted to "make it new" (as Ezra Pound said), referring to a breaking away from poetry's status quo.
"In a Station of the Metro" is a great example of what modernism espoused. A two-line poem with no clear rhyme scheme or meter about the everyday experience of gazing out into a crowded metro station was unlike anything anyone had written before. Furthermore, rather than telling a story or prioritizing long, flowing poetic diction, "In a Station of the Metro" prioritizes a relatively basic set of images, relying on the images themselves (rather than an explanation of them) to do the poem's interpretive work.
Other poets living in the early 20th-century, like T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams, had similarly radical approaches to poetry, each of them unafraid to prioritize different poetic structures and images to craft "new" forms of meaning. e.e. cummings, in particular, is especially famous for breaking grammar rules entirely, offering instead an intriguing blend of musical language and imagery to create meaning.
Although modernism only extended until the mid-20th century, the work it accomplished in inspiring authors to break from poetic convention helped to shape the incredibly diverse and experimental world of poetry we have today.
Historical Context
The main historical context surrounding this poem is the advent of the metro system in Paris. The Industrial Revolution had long since ended, although society was still acclimating to new technologies on a regular basis. Underground trains designed to transport pedestrians throughout the city of Paris revolutionized the work life of many urban dwellers.
Pound published this poem in 1913, so the metro system was still relatively new in the public consciousness, yet the poem could very well be describing metro stations today (an indicator that they perhaps haven't changed all that much in over 100 years!). The poem also seems prescient in its ability to foresee an increased conflict between humans' increased reliance on technology and the natural world ("Petals on a wet, black bough"), a conflict that began to catch on during the Industrial Revolution, and only escalated as time progressed.
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More “In a Station of the Metro” Resources
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External Resources
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"In a Station of the Metro" Original Publication — The Poetry Foundation's website shows a picture of the original 1913 publication of Poetry magazine, in which Pound's short poem was published.
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Ezra Pound Modernism Lab — This blog maintained by students at Yale University has information and critical analysis of Ezra Pound and his works, including "In a Station of the Metro."
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Audio Recording of "In a Station of the Metro" — An audio recording of Pound's poem courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.
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Secrets of the Paris Metro — This New York Times article by Taras Grescoe from the year 2000 discusses the history of the Paris subway system, instituted almost 120 years ago.
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Ezra Pound Biography and Works — Information about Pound's life and many of his notable works, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ezra Pound
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