ENL 10C: The Use of Metaphor in Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”"

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M. Stratton

ENL 10C

9 April 2010

The Use of Metaphor in Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”

Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” uses metaphor to assist description in the poem that might otherwise be limited by the imagist ideal of “strict verbal economy” (Mikics 152). By using an extended metaphor, Pound is able to give the maximum amount of images to the reader with the minimum number words. The content of the poem consists of two major metaphors: the first being between the station of the metro and the “wet, black bough”; the second being the comparison of the faces of the crowd and the petals on the bough. The metaphor conveys maximum imagery with minimal words, and it extends from the title and continues through each line in a continuous flow of linked ideas. Each line changes the image in the mind of the reader to form a more complete idea of what exactly the speaker is seeing: a description of what the speaker sees with his eyes in an urban metro station and turns it to what his mind interprets that vision.

Metaphors play an important role in the form of the poem by allowing the speaker to give a maximum number of images while using the least number of words necessary to convey what the speaker sees. In the first metaphor the metro is indirectly compared to a “wet, black bough” and one can imagine the station and the metro consisting of a long, well-lit tunnel with shining tracks, and people peering from windows that reflect the light. The wetness is the light of the station; the black the shadows created by that same light. The urban, man-made metro station is thus transformed into an object of nature. This same transition is what happens in the second metaphor as well: the crowd of human faces on the metro is transformed into a row of petals with only the use of a trope and a semi-colon.

The semi-colon at the end of the first line of the poem offers the reader the comparison between the contents of the title and the first line, and the final line of the poem, to be juxtaposed side-by-side as equal images in the mind of the reader. As a continued sentence, instead of one broken up by a period, the metaphor is given more weight; the last line of the poem is offered as a parting thought to send the reader away with the final image birthed by the vision of the metro. In using metaphor, Pound gives “two ideas for the price of one…offer[ing] the reader a bonus of meaning” (Mikics 181) all while realizing his goal of using only the most necessary words. The metaphors he uses show the reader what he sees, yet maintains a sense of reader imagination: the reader is allowed imaginary freedom without the extra description, while the speaker maintains the control of what is being described. Both freedoms lie in the use of metaphor, which turns an otherwise ordinary metro station into a wet, petal-laden bough.

Works Cited

Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. London: Yale University Press, 2007. Print.