Beauty Lies Within

In the poem "In a Station of the Metro," Pound creates many different images and gets straight to the point with just fourteen words. When many people first read this poem, it was difficult for them to grasp a meaning from the poem with just two lines. They try to pick out certain parts of the poem to find the meaning and beauty within this poem. However, Pound was able to prove his point that beauty lies within everything and not just one thing.

With the creative use of the word "apparition," Pound describes the many different faces he sees in the crowd in a subway in Paris as a group, a crowd. Apparition alone means the sudden appearance of something, usually dealing with a ghost. Knowing this, "apparition of these faces in the crowd" becomes the shocking appearances of these blurred beautiful faces in the crowd that he had never noticed.

The choice of the word "petals" was used to show how petals resembles flowers, and how a flower is made up of many petals, and how there are a wide variety of flowers. When one buys flowers, they are usually sold as a collection of many different flowers in a bouquet. Like flowers, there are many different colors, race, shapes and sizes of humans. In order to appreciate the beauty of life and the diversity of people, one has to look at them as a collection, not individually. A "wet black bough" simply refers to the subway station; however, one can view this as when it rains or when someone is going through rough times, it is when everyone works together in a group to help out that one notices the true beauty of humans.

In the fairly short poem, there is a contrast between life and death, light and dark. The ghostly appearances of these faces can resemble death because when one walks by an individual, one would not really care to notice who it was or try to find the beauty in s/he. the person then just becomes nothing, as if s/he was dead, and along with the rest have just become the walking dead. On the other hand, if one just stops and takes the time to see the big picture, view everything as a whole, then the ghostly appearances blossom into petals, bringing life and color into the world- revealing their true beauty.

The image of the flower depicts the meaning of this poem. In the midst of the crowd, one is not noticed, but blends in. The dark spaces represents the individual people- the ghostly figures- just being space fillers, just being random everyday people at the subway station. However, when viewed collectively- like petals forming a beautiful flower- one will notice the beauty that lies within the crowd. Thus beauty stands out more when one sees the whole picture and not just an individual aspect. Everything has beauty within, regardless of their type.

Pound's choices in diction was a very effective tool in creating vivid images of what the underlying meaning of the poem is. The use of apparition and petals contrasts one another but links the two ideas together. The beauty of this poem lies within the whole poem itself, not in individual words or sentences.