The Subway Will Never be the Same

In a Station of the Métro, by Ezra Pound

     The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
     Petals on a wet, black bough.

Wait...that's it? That's all you get to say on the Parisian subway station, the New Yorkesque hubbub of the European world? All I see are two disjointed sentences that seem to have no connection to each other (except the semi-colon--not that that helps). What else? Is there more? Where is it?!?!

So the poem might have driven me crazy over the past week; yes, I could have simply chosen another poem from this dense Lit book, but to be completely honest I didn't want to be beaten by two (or three, if you count the title) lines of text. Upon reading the poem again, a picture formed in my mind: a solitary, old Asian lady sitting on a wet bench inside the Métro, people-watching. There's a mural in front of her, where the subway tunnel is, of a Japanese-like painting of those trees with white-tinged-pink petals on it...kind of like this:

http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/cherry-blossom-andrea-realpe.jpg

I still can't decide if this is a sad or happy picture. I do feel this twinge of sadness, not for the old lady, but of overall dark and empty this sentence brings. There's no connection between the people in the crowd and the speaker, and this irks me for some reason. Even the title brings this up; the description of the setting as a subway station alludes to the ever-changing, temporary place--an intermediary for people who travel, whether from the house to the grocery store or from Germany to Russia. It's like this lifestyle makes people move too much, too fast for anyone to make any type of personal connection to anyone else in this station, despite the physically close proximity to all these travelers.

Now comes this feeling of discord and isolation in the first line. The word 'apparition' is used here, which you would think is connected to some type of ghost or imaginative figure; however, this is used to describe 'these faces in the crowd'. The addition of the word "these" gives it a sense of almost wonder that faces even exist in such a place as the Métro. Faces stand for emotion, for liveliness and connection, but adding on the "apparition" changes this connotation entirely into that of a ghostly, pale feature without a body. Kind of creepy, now that I think of it: apparitions of floating faces on top of indistinguishable, blurred bodies due to fast-paced movement. And what is up with the lack of bodies in general? It's as if all the speaker notices is the face, and all these faces are part of a crowd, which isn't a living thing either--it's just one moving, machine-like entity.

Now comes the second part of the poem, which provides a metaphor for this loneliness, if you look hard enough. 'Petals on a wet, black bough' is that painting of the tree I was talking about before. There's that parallel between faces and petals; petals are the parts of the flower that everyone notices first; it's the part of the flower that's beautiful and makes an impression on the mind. But then again, there's the fact that the petals only form part of the flower, in the way that faces are only part of the body. By itself, petals are quite lifeless things, and don't keep well without the source that brings them life: a body, a heart, or a stem, the roots.

The second portion--"a wet, black bough"-- is the medium for which these lifeless things live through. The alliteration of the hard 'b' in "black bough" first gives me that ominous feeling of darkness and uneasiness. Or maybe it's just me.
And what's a 'bough', you ask? It's a branch of a tree--connections, connections. Like a crowd, the boughs form this unquantifiable number of branches, similar to the crowd. And yet, there's no mention of the branch, or the stem, that the petals are part of. It's black, which may refer to how wet the branches are. Black symbolizes the usual, depressing topics: death, intimidation, secrets, the unknown. Is this not like the crowd running around from train stop to train stop?

I guess Ezra Pound does have a point to get across with this deceivingly short poem; something about our movement, our constant shifting, contributes to this lack of connection to the human spirit in our body's core. Of course there are faces that have the ability to convey emotion, but it's only temporary, and that's all the speaker notices; a flower's petals are appealing to our olfactory senses, but only if connected to the source that gives them their smell. The ever-changing, fast-paced life takes away from the whole picture, the whole figure of the being disappears and all we see are unrecognizable, blank faces. Now that I think of all these parts that make up the poem, the emotions and picture that rises matches to the one before the analysis--a lonely woman on a bench viewing this generation of hurried souls who only take notice of faces, not of people.