Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.
The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.
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"In a Station of the Metro"
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.
At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.
There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.
A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.
These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.
Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:
"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"
Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:
"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" ("Vorticism").
The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.
Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.
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