Great Poems – Easy to Memorize:

Ezra Pound –

In a Station of the Metro

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

1913

Ok—anybody should be able to memorize this one; it’s basically three lines.

The title situates us. We’re in a station of the metro, which we know to be London from the biographical knowledge we have of Pound’s life. And it’s a general location: “a” station, not Piccadilly Circus or Covent Garden.

What are the images?: apparition/ faces/ crowd/ petals/ and a wet, black bough.

I’m preparing a step-by-step general entry on how I memorize  poems, but the short version is: once you are 1.) familiar with the content and tone of the poem, you focus on 2.) the imagery, 3.) the sounds of a poem, especially the rhyme, 4.) the rhythms, metrical or free, and 5.) anything and everything else you find to be salient or outstanding about the poem. Keep repeating the lines over and over and you will succeed (more tips later.)

I find concepts and conceptual words like “apparition” to be images. You may not; it’s just the way my mind works. The OED Quick Search tells us an apparition is a “noun, a ghost or ghostlike image of a person. The appearance of something remarkable or unexpected… [and its] origin comes from the Late Middle English (in the sense of ‘the action of appearing’) from the Latin apparere “attendance.” I dispute the idea that an apparition has to be “of a person,” and I cite the appearance of the bloody dagger in Macbeth, but that’s getting off the subject. In Pound’s poem “apparition” does refer to people, but with the spooky flavor of ghostliness and the suggestion of something perhaps hallucinogenic.

But then we’re brought to more solid reality, the “faces in the crowd.” Pound is relying on shared experiences. He knows his audience will have a shared experience of what it’s like to take a ride on the Metro, and will have images of “faces in the crowd” stored in their image banks, which will quickly be recalled to mind. Note that this time it is “faces in ‘the’ crowd.” Now we are in a specific crowd, a move on Pound’s part which subtly engages the imagination of the reader/listener. Now we are in “the” particular crowd each of us calls to mind.

The first line is the set up; now we get the punch line.

“Petals.” The leap of metaphor; the leap from “faces” to “petals.” If you can try to remember the very first time you read or heard or got this poem, I believe you will remember how breath-taking it was to first make that leap along with and thanks to Pound’s imagination.

And “on a wet, black bough” ups the ante. The image I get is a tree (actually a dogwood tree by the house where we lived when I was very young, on Dogwood Lane) in early spring just after a rainstorm. (This pulls me out to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, ‘A Cold Spring.’ Such is the way poems pull on each other by allusion and association, and so I must gently bring myself back to Pound.) A tree with dark bark, just after a rain storm, with the wet petals of the tree slicked down on the branch. And the darkness of the branch magically encompasses the field of vision and surrounds it as completely as if it were the darkness of the underground station, with the people tumbling out of the tunnel coming up to the light of day, their faces echoing the petals on the tree branch, one by one or sometimes overlapping.

A word about diction: “apparition” is Latinate, that is to say it comes from the strata of the English language that originated in Roman times, and was brought into English after the Norman Invasion (1066 CE) when Latin and French were the languages used by the French court, the ruling class. Long story short, it sounds elegant and refined, and “bough,” although Old English from the German, also sounds Latinate, and so creates a Latinate sounding ending word that echoes the beginning, “apparition.” “Bough” means “shoulder” in Old English, related to the Dutch “shoulder or ship’s bow” and the German “horse’s hock or shoulder.” This idea of a shoulder gives a subliminal visual echo to the branch of the tree, one of the main branches, substantial. And the word “bough” also brings to mind the nursery rhyme, “when the bough breaks…” which adds to the sense of fragility of the image of the ‘wet petals.’

And on to the sounds and musicality of the poem, which is always the key to memorization: we have the lovely slant, end rhyme between “crowd” and “bough.” Frankly, in my opinion, this is the reason why this poem is so memorable. I’m also taken with the repetition of the “t”s in “metro,” “wet,” and “petals,” and the internal rhyme between “station” and “apparition.” Rhythmically, the poem is ostensibly in free verse, the cadence is conversational (it certainly isn’t in iambic pentameter), and it doesn’t scan in any traditional way, but the musicality reinforces the elegance of the imagery; it’s as if Pound, without intending it, is keeping one foot in traditional prosody. (Please forgive this and all bad puns.)

“In a Station of the Metro” is the classic example of the type of poem that embodies the ideals of the short-lived, but highly influential movement known as “Imagism.” Ezra Pound was one of the movers and shakers who championed Imagism, and much of modernist poetry, but more about that at another time…