Subway Faces

For a poet so notoriously difficult and often impenetrable, it's funny that this may be his best-known work.

In a Station of the Metro

Ezra Pound

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




If you might not be aware, Ezra Pound was one of the seminal figures in 20th-century poetry. Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, HD all owed a lot to him as a publisher, editor, critic, promoter and literary influence. 


In English major circles it's his Cantos that are the best-known, and are one thorny, difficult nut to crack. They're still controversial, too - a few years back Poetry magazine published a prose piece that has the memorable lines "When I fell out of love with the Cantos, I fell all the way out." There's still debate whether there's any point in slogging and laboring to work them through. 


So it's funny that such as simple, natural image as easy to grasp as a haiku may be one of his most lasting legacies. Don't believe me? Here's three photos I found in less than a minute just by doing an image search for the exact text of the last line.

It's funny, too, because this was one of the earliest poems I ever remember reading. I think I was in elementary school in Portugal and our Reading textbook included the poem and a crude pen-and-ink drawing that resembled both petals and faces.


If you want to be literal about it. 


It makes sense that Pound helped kickstart the Imagist movement, whose battle cry was "No images but in things." They wanted the simple, direct path in describing objects and let that immediacy and purity be enough for poetry. It doesn't have to be deep, in fact it shouldn't be. Deep things are the lies people tell themselves to feel good. Things are the only things that are inescapable and inarguable.


It's a good point that severely irked me at the time, and to a degree still does. After reading some Imagist poems I wonder, "If describing this so well is your main aim, why did you decide to take up a non-visual medium?" But it takes all kinds, so they say. I guess I believe them.


Here's another kind that it takes.