"In a Station of the Metro"-Ezra Pound

In Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” there are several features, such as rhythm, structure, imagery, and stanza, that prove it is poetic and can really be called a poem. The first thing I noticed that showed me “In a Station of the Metro” is a poem is the way the poem is organized, its structure. The poem is divided into two lines, a couplet, which is a two-line stanza, and that is the whole poem. The poem incorporates rhyme, also. The rhyme is an internal and end rhyme. It occurs at the end of each line, and it occurs inside the word. It is also feminine rhyme because it occurs as a soft vowel sound instead of a hard consonant sound. Another characteristic of poems that “In a Station of the Metro” puts to use is rhythm. The poem is not organized into a structured sentence, but it is, instead, organized into two different and divided phrases. The phrases are separated by a semi-colon, which is not proper use of grammar but is an interesting technique. The author intends to show a pause, or a separation between the two ideas. This is a very poetic feature of this poem. Also, the word structures of the two different lines are very different. In the first line, the most noticeable sounds repeated are the vowel sounds, while in the second line consonants are repeated throughout. As the structure of the poem illustrates poetic qualities, so do the words and multiple interpretations of the poem. Ezra Pound compares “faces in the crowd” to “petals on a wet, black bough.” There are many possible interpretations for these words. One interpretation is that the faces Pound sees in the crowd stand out to him like petals stand out on a bough, which also includes beauty without specifically stating it. The faces seem ghostlike, which may be what the petals also seem like.