Much Ado About a Subway—Part 2

 

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   In a Station of the Metro

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   The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

   Petals on a wet, black, bough.

 

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In the first part of this essay we saw that the rhythms in the title and first line of “In a Station of the Metro” are arranged in regular, four-syllable units that imitate the repetitive sound of train wheels clicking over the gaps in a track as they pass from one rail to the next—until, that is, the beginning of the last line, when something happens to derail the train.

 

A good friend and colleague, a distinguished scholar and editor in literary as well as musical studies (and an excellent cello player!), has written to say he didn’t like “reducing poems to rhythms,” especially in the classroom. “‘Seeming’ an echo to the sense is quite a bit more complex than merely echoing it,” he goes on to say, “just as realism is more complex than merely reproducing reality.”

 

True that. Imagine someone telling you that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is all about “Fate knocking at the door,” based only on its opening “ta-ta-ta-DAAAAAH!” (Anton Schindler, the composer’s secretary, vouched for it.) Or boiling down a Chopin Prelude to Alfred Cortot’s flowery statement, “Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory."

 

Reducing any complex work of art to a single feature or impression serves no (or little) purpose unless we use it to support a more “complex” argument. Fate and perfume may, however, offer good starting points for further exploration. Schindler attributed his statement to Beethoven himself. But what did the composer have in mind, beyond the obvious? Cortot was a concert pianist and one of the greatest interpreters of Chopin who ever lived. Was his aperçu just cocktail chat? Or was he helping a student understand how to phrase a challenging passage? Or giving a lecture? What else did he have to say about this particular Prelude?

 

Complexities arise only if we venture beyond the obvious.

 

In Pound’s poem the complexities begin to arise, rhythmically, when it turns (and our eyes turn with it) from the second to the third line. (Let’s read the poem as the haiku it longs to be and treat its title as the first line.) This is where the clickety-clacking “da-ta-DA-ta” rhythm carrying us smoothly from “in a STAtion of the METro,” on through “app-a-RI-tion of these FAces,” only to leave hanging the last quiet beat that should follow “in the CROWD,” suddenly collides with “PETals,” never to recover.

 

Like a subway train jolting to a stop, but not where expected, which should be at a well-lit station.

 

There the trains ease to a stop and, after a pause, gently continue on their way, like the reader of a poem who arrives at the end of a line and pauses there (perhaps only as long as it takes to move their eyes back to the left margin) before smoothly resuming their journey. In Pound’s haiku, passengers leave and passengers board at these stations on their own regular rounds of the day, their own repetitive journeys from one expected stopping place to another, where, in the immortal words of David Byrne, they will “get things done.”

 

Between stations, passengers read in their well-lit cars, or engage in conversation, or are lost in their own thoughts. Until they approach the next stop. But by that point, it’s expected, isn’t it? Expectation, dwelling in the future, becomes part of the daily routine by which most of us manage to ignore what surrounds us, out there, in the dark, as we sit here in our well-lit places.

 

What’s out there, besides that lulling, nearly imperceptible “clickety-clack”—the musical wallpaper of our commute through life—which registers, even when we’re not paying attention to it, the passage of time.

 

The rhythmic disruption we experience as we make the turn between lines 2 and 3—that sudden gap (this one jolting, not to be ignored) followed by the sharp collision with “PEtals”—marks a point of transition in the poem. Or rather, of dislocation, a jump from one region of experience to another: from indoors (a subway) to outdoors (flowers, trees, wet weather, seasons), from movement (of passengers, crowds, trains) to stillness (the petals are sticking, motionless, to the wet bough).

 

From a world of dimly moving shapes to a world of distinct images.

 

From what the poet sees underground to what he imagines—or remembers—above.

 

Underground.

 

What’s down here?

 

“The apparition.”

 

An odd choice of words. Pound could have written “appearance” if all he meant was what he saw. The great, late critic Helen Vendler was fond of asking her students, “Why did the poet choose this word and not another?” Then they’d consider what other words would make plausible substitutes and try them out, until the associations, etymologies, emotional resonances, echoes, allusions, class affiliations, and other nuances of the poet’s choice became starkly and unmistably clear.

 

We don’t have to venture far to discover the most prominent feature of “apparition” that distinguishes it from a mere “appearance.” An “apparition” is what we call a ghost.

 

To put it bluntly, Pound’s second line sends us straight to Hell, and more specifically, to the banks of the “sad river of Acheron” depicted in the third canto of Dante’s Inferno (line 78 in Charles Singleton’s translation). There we await the arrival of Charon, the ferryman, to carry us over “to the other shore” (86).

 

Too much “complexity”?

 

Let’s see how much is too much.

 

It’s here, along the Acheron, that the souls of Dante’s damned gather for their final journey "to eternal darkness" (87). The poet describes them in a striking metaphor that, like Pound’s “petals,” draws on the power of the changing seasons:

 

As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground . . . . one by one they cast themselves from that shore . . . and before they have landed on the other shore, on this side a new throng gathers (112-120).

 

At this point, Dante’s reader has barely begun their long, long journey through Hell and Purgatory to eternal salvation, in the company of Dante the Pilgrim and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. By the time we arrive in Paradise, in the third part of The Divine Comedy, we will have run the course of the poet’s seasonal metaphors many times over.

 

At the end of our journey, in the penultimate canto of Paradiso and of Dante’s epic poem, the fruits of summer, the fallen leaves of autumn, and the black, barren boughs of winter all culminate in the Pilgrim’s vision of an eternal spring: the Mystic Rose of Heaven, emblem of the Virgin Mary. Upon the myriad petals of this “pure white rose” (XXXI, 1), arranged in concentric tiers around the throne of God, sit or kneel “the saintly host” (2) of those whose virtuous lives have earned them a place in the immediate presence of the triune Deity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—for all eternity.

 

No such destiny, it seems, awaits the passengers in the Paris Metro. For them, it’s just one dark tunnel after another, a kind of Ground Hog’s Day of eternal damnation and rebirth.

 

Pound was not the first poet, and certainly not the last, to depict the modern city as Hell and its citizens as dead and damned. His close friend and fellow poet, T. S. Eliot, drew on the same canto of The Divine Comedy to describe the morning commuters of London in "The Wasteland":

 

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.
I had not thought death had undone so many.

 

Eliot’s last line is a quotation from the same canto of the Inferno that inspired Pound’s vision of the Paris Metro: “non averei creduto/ che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (36-37).

 

Damnation’s dead leaves, like the petals of a blasted rose, were once alive. They drew sustenance from the parent plant that bore them and that gave them a shape—a purposeful arrangement.

 

Modern society, in Pound’s view as in Eliot’s, is chaotic and shapeless, like the crowds in a subway station, because it lacks that central source of vitality: a common faith, a common purpose or meaning. A common “destination,” if you will.

 

Modern life, in short, should be a thing of beauty in which every part, like the petals of a blossoming rose, draws life from all the others through the arrangement of the whole.

 

This is also what Pound thought poetry should be. Every sentence, word, syllable, and mark of punctuation should contribute to the meaning of the poem in its entirety. In a well-ordered life, as in a well-written poem, there should be no wasted motion.

 

Pound had a word for poems like this: they are vortices.

 

(to be continued)

 

 

 

                                                                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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