In a Station of the Metro

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.”

Ezra Pound        

  The spirit of modernist experimentation is that of expressing in the truest possible way the innermost and most important aspects life and of the internal voice, the “me,” behind the eyes. In short it is the soul on the page whether it is graceful and pure or decrepit and dirty. The treatment of the “thing,” is a continuation of this idea, we are often treated to quite singular moments or experiences that, although relative to the world around them, are reaching out (or in) for a larger truth. This is not to say that modernism was an extension of romanticism and its leading us to a “beyond of some kind,” [1] it is more accurately about  letting us lead ourselves there if we so wish.

            The larger truth or exquisite moment we are handed by Pound in this poem is of him alighting from a train in the Paris underground and seeing a series of beautiful faces. These faces get turned into petals on a bough and become part of Pound’s equation, by using this metaphor the “thing,” is given directly to us. There is no intermediary force of explanation of the feeling or intervention of the poet’s body, it is as if we are given someone else’s dream to wear for a while rather than have that dream tediously relayed. As Pound said in Gaudier-Brzeska “In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms it, or darts into a thing inward and subjective,”[2] the first line is the outward and the second is the inward spectacle, the darting motion happens as we realise one line equals another.

            The poet’s body, or lack of it, is a defining feature of modernist experimentation. We are often taken out of the realm of the physical and thrust into the darker ends of human thought, there is little concern for the way people look and how their body is formed, only the internal is worthy of close and meticulous inspection. The distinction is made best by Woolf in Modern Fiction when she constantly refers to “life,”[3] as the internal, the importance is such that we are asked to forget entirely the world that surrounds us and focus on the way we perceive it from within. The form then is as important as the content because it is that part of a text that tells us the how of expression, the way in which we think.

The bough is the metro itself, a strong and important branch of a journey that other further journeys separate off from, as if the collective transportation of the passengers thus far is the thickest part of the branch and the inevitable splitting up would eventually end in the individual blossoms which are the individual people. The blackness of it is the darkness surrounding those in the metro, it being either the exciting, unknown seductiveness of modern transportation or the dirty and corrupting forces of it. The station is itself a contruct (and crutch) of modern society, and although it is important and impressive, is still grubby and unwelcoming in itself. The function of the metro is what is important not the structure itself, the structure is merely a symbol for its function. This may be what Hulme meant when he said “Beauty may be in small, dry things.”[4]

The “apparition,” of the faces in the crowd leads us to believe that he did not expect such a phenomenon in such a place, the ghostly appearance of these people, and their beauty meeting him at every glance. The experience is supernatural, or so intensely real that we are to almost consider the notion romantic, but this is not the particular intent, we are intended to consider it a improbable incident that implausible as it may be is entirely possible. These ghosts are unbelievable, they have no place in a solid environment and we are not entirely sure of their intent. They are ghostly because of possibly an aimless or effortless grace that must be held to still be beautiful when being squeezed off a train, another reading could give us the interpretation that Pound found himself distant from these people, and he was not part of the world they inhabited at the time. The apparitions may be experiencing something he could not or was not. They are viewed rather voyeuristically on the platform through no fault of the poet as the faces seem to be placed into his view wherever he turns; this forced voyeurism is part of modernist experimentation, being thrust into a situation illuminating humanity from the internal. Without the metro station itself this situation would not have come about, this many people would not have been in the same place to strike pound without it, this is part of the modern celebration of technology.

The petals are wet and creased, this conjures the image of people rushing off the train, caught amongst others, pink rising in their cheeks, the creases created by the petals being wet is equal to the stress and pull of the situation. The creases that are implied are that of weary grind, of too long on the train and small exasperations. The faces stand out as much against the crowd as they do against the sooty station this is because the crowd is as drab and dull as the station, they are symbols of function and necessity as opposed to the beautiful ones standing out from them. This is what makes the experience worth recording; the unlikelihood of something so terrific happening in the real world. These abused faces have little individuality they are mostly anonymous, not as faceless as the entity known as “the crowd,” but still without personal features, this is the modern and assumedly new experience of being surrounded by anonymous strangers. It is a bi-product of city life but the experience was never as close to strangers as the metro, the people you see in the street may have no meaning to you but you have the choice of avoiding them, down in the metro you have no choice, the necessity of your journey forces you into closer quarters than would otherwise be desired.  The anonymity of strangers within range of 

The rhythm here is that of a piece of music, albeit short, a slow build-up then a brief cascade of sounds. The dislocation of the two lines by syntax forces us to read the poem as an equation, the semi-colon could well have been replaced with an equals sign and we weigh out both sides and find them equally balanced, the images are overlaying “its compactness is not superficial, but real and masterly.”[5]  The pauses in the second line put emphasis on the last part of the poem and the half rhyming vowel sounds of “bough,” and “crowd.” If we were to look back at the first printed version of the poem we would see Pound setting out the poem quite differently.

“The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd:

              Petals     on a wet, black     bough.”[6]

The spaces give the poem a different rhythm entirely, we are given more pausing time in the first line and the caesura is moved or removed entirely. Musically it gives us a longer piece to hear, we are given the single syllables at the beginning and end of the last line and excluding “the apparition,” we are left with four-beats a segment giving a steadier beat as there is a repetition, however limited. This version seems mostly to highlight the poet’s intention of musicality, and his leaning towards concrete poetry.

The station metro is not the “thing,” treated here, the “thing,” is the experience which pound is treating. We find that he is deeming the image “true,” in the sense of “not just the state of mind of the perceiver, but to the real appearance, the real relations in real space, of what is perceived.”[7] What we receive is not an approximation of a feeling it is a true experience given to us in the best style of modern experimentalism without any kind of spacing between us and the experience itself. Pound had inferred that the key to modernism is “make it new,” which is quite an easy thing to say, it is quite another to make it happen.

Bibliography

·         Donald Davie, Ezra Pound poet as sculptor, (London 1965)

·         Donald Davie, Pound,(Fontana 1975)

·         John Espey, Ezra Pound’s Mauberley, (London 1974)

·         Mina Loy, The Last LunarBaedeker, (Charlotte, N. Carolina, 1982)

·         Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, (London, 1973)

·         Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska, (New York, 1970)

·         Ezra Pound, Selected Poems 1908-1969, (London, 1975)

[1] Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”,  The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8^th edition, volume F, pp 2001

[2] Ezra Pound, Gaudier –Brzeska, (New York, 1970) pp 89

[3] Virginia Woolf, Modern fiction, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8^th edition, Volume F, 1925 pp. 2087-92

[4] Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8^th Edition, Volume F, pp 2002

[5] Donald Davie, Ezra Pound Poet As Sculptor, (London 1965)

[6] Poetry, (April 1913)

[7] Donald Davie, Pound, (Fontana 1975), pp 44