The Metro

In a station at the Metro
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
--Ezra Pound

No matter how pretentious this may sound, this poem really does keep popping into my head when I step onto the platform of the Metro. I have read this poem in at least two English classes. Each time the professors introduced the poem in the same way, by reading the two lines aloud over and over again to the class.

I remember one evening when my sister and I still shared a bedroom. We stayed awake picking different words to say over and over again until they were no longer recognizable as English words. It wasn’t really that the words lost their meaning; we had just never examined the words in that way or been so forced to think about their meanings—to convince ourselves that what sounded like gibberish truly had meaning.

“In a station at the metro” requires the same thing of its reader and this is what my professors were trying to teach us. I think the point of the poem that we were supposed to question, as its meaning grew cloudier with each reading, was the “wet, black bough.” It took a few times through the poem to realize that my mind didn’t want to allow the word “black” entrance into what I wanted to be a poem about petals and light. It was even hard for me to accept that “wet” wasn’t “white.” Sparing the English lesson, my class eventually arrived at something that we thought was close to the intended meaning of the poem. We got there by straying as far as possible from one meaning to allow space for new ones to creep in.

In Paris, if I want to get anywhere, I take the Metro. I can’t help but love it. This romance, I imagine, eventually fades with time. My sister affirmed that at first she loved the Metro, too. Sometimes she still does. I would guess that many Parisians have conflicted feelings about the Metro. Sometimes you just want to get home and you don’t want to nudge your way through a crowd of shopping bags and big coats. Other times, you meander casually through an empty tunnel, down some stairs, onto a train and sit passively as the train whizzes through magic darkness.

The Metro operates like Pound’s poem. It seems to mean one thing at first, but standing in a station staring at the faces plastered against the walls, the “petals on a wet, black bough,” one starts to understand that ineffable, dynamic element of life that Pound captured somewhere in between two lines of verse. Some of the petals are weary. Some of them are lively. Some are laughing. Some are talking on the phone. Some are checking their watches, scrutinizing their route, strategically planning which car to board. Some are running to catch the train that emerges from the dark tunnel to carry them away.