In a Station of the Metro Themes
Versions of Reality
The poem blends two images into one. In the process, it seems to downplay the reality of everyday life as an "apparition," while the spiritual life of memory and the imagination is heightened. Poun...
Man and the Natural World
In the poem, people and nature literally become one as the faces in the subway become flowers on a tree. The analogy between faces and flowers is not just a simile, which would say that one thing i...
Modernization
If you were a person living in Paris near the beginning of the 20th century, there would be a lot of reasons to be afraid of the metro. The crowd of anonymous strangers pushing past one another, bl...
The Supernatural
One of the central mysteries of the poem is, why are the faces the poets sees an "apparition"? This word usually refers to ghosts or supernatural spirits. Pound seems to be comparing the beautiful...