Much Ado About a Subway—Part 3
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In the first two parts of this essay we saw that the rhythms in the title and first line of Ezra Pound’s “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 while passing from one rail to the next, as in the Paris Metro of the title. That is, until we reach the last line, when something derails the train.
With “PETals,” the poem’s easy rocking rhythms come to a jarring halt, a sudden reversal of momentum, and this halt coincides with an epiphanic, totally unexpected “association of ideas,” as the poet William Wordsworth might say: the “apparition of these faces in the crowd” calls to Pound’s mind the image of “petals on a wet, black, bough.”
In the empty white space between the two lines where these juxtaposed images appear lies what Pound calls “the Vortex.”
Pound had a lot to say about the Vortex, and “Vorticism,” his theory of what makes good poetry. He was heavily influenced by “Imagism,” that is, the idea that the fundamental building block of a poem is the image—not a metaphor or a simile, which uses the image to illustrate some feature or quality of what’s being described. No, simply the image itself. Period.
When left alone to do its magic, the image, as Pound writes in “A Few Don’ts,” “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”:
It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.
This “complex” creates a centripetal force-field in the mind of the poet and the reader, which gathers and gives a unified direction to associated perceptions, memories, sensations, and feelings, much as the still, empty eye of a hurricane or a tornado attracts the objects surrounding it into a rapidly whirling funnel.
Because the image creates different vortices of association in each individual mind, its possible meanings are, like the human imagination itself, inexhaustible and, thus, beyond any final explanation. Which, I guess, makes everything I’ve written about “In a Station of the Metro” in the previous two parts of this essay, from the significance of its repetitive rhythmic cadences to its Dantean invocations of the Underworld, merely provisional.
Another way of saying this is that the vortex is the poetic image at work in the mind, gathering associated ideas there, before reason—that is, critical analysis—can select and arrange them into a specific pattern. (1)
In his essay, “Vortex,” published in Blast magazine in 1914, Pound put it this way:
The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art.
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to drag itself out into mimicry.
“Mimicry” uses the image to describe or refer to something else. It makes the image a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. “Mimicry” is, for all intents and purposes, an explanation —of how something appears, of how it works, of what it symbolizes. “Mimicry” is what metaphor and simile do with images.
We can see, immediately, why Pound was so drawn to the Japanese haiku (or hokku, as he spells it), which ideally consists of nothing but images, with no explanation.
All well and good. But does this idea of the image as pure, ineffable vortex, a vacuum compelling the poet and the reader to fill it with swirling “intellectual and emotional” associations unsullied by mimicry or explanation, correspond to our experience of “In a Station of the Metro”?
No, it doesn’t, and for a very good reason: the second image, the petals torn from the blossom and scattered on the black bough, mimics the first, the faces of the crowd set against the gloom of the underground station. Both images are dispersed and disembodied splotches of color set against a dark background. Both represent something once alive that is now dead, or might as well be.
And this resemblance between faces and petals points to a fundamental problem in Pound’s definition of the “vortex” and “Vorticism” generally, a problem to which he seems blithely oblivious.
In another essay, “Vorticism,” published in The Fortnightly Review in September, 1914, Pound expanded on the idea of the Vortex in connection with the Japanese haiku form, and tried to explain how his composition of “In a Station of the Metro” fit the requirements of that genre.
Here are the two examples of haiku he cites:
The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.
and
The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:
(are like) plum-blossoms.
He then adds a curious remark: “The words ‘are like’ would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.”
“Are like” is the language of simile, which depends on a resemblance between one thing and another in feature, quality, aspect, or function. In short, Pound is talking about mimicry, which is quite prominently on display in the two haiku he cites.
Now, smart and talented and knowledgeable as he was, Pound often spoke nonsense. About Fascism, for example, and the wise leadership of folks like Benito Mussolini. Nonsense that got him into a great deal of trouble after World War II.
And believe or not, he sometimes spoke nonsense about poetry. The fundamental building blocks of poetry are words, not images, which poetry shares with painting and programmatic music (e.g, Debussy’s La Mer). And what distinguishes a poem from other things made of words is its arrangement on the page in distinct linear units that retain their length and spatial relationship to each other in every printed or written iteration. Prose, by contrast, is margin-justified, and drama is arranged in alternating speeches.
Pound also spoke nonsense—occasionally, just occasionally—about poets. Wordsworth, for example, about whom the best advice he can muster is, “Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem unutterably dull.”
Not a very nice thing to say about the poet who, more than a century before he conceived the notion, hit upon the association of ideas that lies at the heart of Pound’s Vorticism.
It was in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, his first collection of verses, that Wordsworth announced his intention to “trac[e] . . . the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” He was talking about emotional excitement, a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that eventuates in poetry, but only when “recollected in tranquility.” (2)
The second part of this account of the creative process, the “recollected in tranquility” part, is often overlooked by those who, like Pound, find Wordsworth simple-minded. “Spontaneous” poetry seldom wins admiration, and when it does, the luster soon fades. It’s like ore fresh from the mine: it must be smelted, crafted, polished, and tested at every stage of revision if it is to retain that power to astonish which only spontaneity, or its artfully preserved impression, can convey.
If we want a concrete example of precisely what Wordsworth has in mind, we need look no further than Pound’s own account of the composition of “In a Station of the Metro,” which he included in the “Vorticism” essay for The Fortnightly Review.
THREE YEARS AGO in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.
Pound spent well over a year looking for exactly the right words for his original and “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” After an arduous process of revision, he found the key he needed to unlock his tongue in a moment of tranquil recollection, after reading a Japanese haiku:
I found [the haiku] useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:–
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”
It seems Wordsworth understood Pound better than Pound understood Wordsworth, without the latter ever having read a line of “In a Station of the Metro.” We might even say Wordsworth understood Pound better than Pound understood himself.
* * *
By the time “Vorticism” appeared in The Fortnightly Review, World War I, “The Great War,” had begun. Just the month before, in August 1914, five bloody battles had been fought, the so-called “Battles of the Frontier.” By September, French casualties amounted to some 260,000, including 75,000 fatalities. In the First Battle of the Marne, fought early that month, another 80,000 men died in combat.
It’s difficult to encounter the "apparition" of faces Pound records seeing beneath the Place de la Concorde and not take it as a portent of these devastating losses. Many of the beautiful faces he beheld in the Paris Metro on that day could only have appeared, by September 1914, as literal apparitions.
In fact, the storm of war had been gathering for years, and many people were aware of its approach, not just poets like Ezra Pound. Although they continued to trust to the power of diplomacy, no one could deny that the barometer of the Zeitgeist, the “Spirit of the Age,” was falling rapidly.
Which brings me to my final question: How did the “petals” on this “wet, black bough” end up there?
The crucial clue is the word “wet,” which calls attention to itself both sonically and rhythmically.
First, Pound has gone to the trouble of making it rhyme, internally, with the first syllable of “petals,” which launches the last line and throws the whole rhythm of the poem “off the track.” Second, he’s made sure “wet” is the first syllable after “petals” to receive emphasis. Both of them are anticipated, in the title, by the first syllable of "Metro.”
How did these “black boughs” get wet? There is, I believe, only once plausible explanation: a storm. We are looking at the aftermath of a tempest.
With that realization, the final, gnomic line of the poem opens up like a blossom, or the mouth of a vortex, attracting into its center a host of associated causes and effects.
The rainwater that turned these boughs “black” is, presumably, what makes the petals torn off by the wind stick to them in this dispersed, disorganized fashion, so at odds with the symmetrically arranged petals of a living flower. The rhythmically explosive force of the accented first syllable of “petals” (the “p” is what linguists call a “plosive” consonant) mimics the sudden onset of this storm. Sound, once more, echoes sense, in the last line of the poem as in the first two.
Moreover, if what we are viewing is the aftermath of a storm, then the petals have not fallen by a natural process of maturation, fruition, and decay. They have been prematurely torn away from the blossom that nourished them, leaving it devoid of fruit and of seeds for future harvests. The cyclical life-rhythm of the seasons has been violently disrupted.
We needn’t look far for the significance of these associations in the context of war. The red poppy in particular survives to this day as a symbol of remembrance for those young men “cut down in the bloom of youth” who gave their lives to “make the world safe for democracy.”
Did Pound foretell, three years before it erupted, the catastrophic storm of the Great War in “In a Station of the Metro”?
Apparently, he had an inkling.
Percy Shelley would agree. “Poets,” he wrote in A Defence of Poetry, “were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, . . . prophets”:
For [the poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is . . . , but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.
The ”germs” or seeds produced by the flowers and fruits of “latest time” are what impregnate the present with the future. In the same manner do the thoughts of the poet, informed by knowledge of the past and personal experience, germinate visions of what that future will, or might, be.
In “Vortex,” Pound described the relation of the Vortex to past and future time in similar terms, as an impregnation of the poet’s mind:
All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,
NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE.
The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.
Put this way, the vortex sounds like a womb, an empty space waiting to be filled, or penetrated, and the poet’s job is to let it conceive without inducing labor: to nurture--to “re-collect,” to re-gather--the memory of that original “sudden emotion” in the Metro, that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and let it gestate “in tranquility" until it reaches its own natural term.
“To me the meanest flower that blows,” wrote Wordsworth in the “Intimations” ode, “can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Or for words, it seems.
They will blossom in their own sweet time.
Notes:
1. In an essay on Cavalcanti published in Literary Essays (1931), Pound employed a related metaphor, drawn from contemporary physics but reaching back to Dante’s Mystic Rose, to describe the vortical impact of Cavalcanti’s poetry: “the rose that [a] magnet makes in the iron filings” as it draws near them (pp. 154-5).
2. Wordsworth's precise words are to be found in the "Preface" to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800): “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”