Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a metaphor that likes faces in a crowd to petals on a black bough. The comparison serves to make out the faces to be delicate and harmless, symbolized by the flower petals, and yet they’re tied to a much more imposing a possibly powerful entity which is the crowd, the black bough and its sturdy essence symbolizing a stable and commanding force. The metaphor states the idea of people seeming so powerless and incapable of making change, just bits of grains of sand, but they are all connected to bigger truth in which, when everyone stands for the same thing, they can achieve unimaginable things.
The length of the poem is so short that the reader wonders just what it is the writer can fit so easily into two lines. The shortness then interlocks with the assuredness of the speaker. Being able to state something in such few words creates a tone of security, as well as the obvious meditating and deep quality of anyone who would compare a pack of faces to flower petals. But the certainty makes the metaphor to be even more impacting, given the fact that the writer is sure it means something. And so the message that people in mass can be extremely imposing and powerful becomes more prevailing.
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