At a Station of the Metro is a two-line poem by the American poet of the 20th century Ezra Pound. This work is an avant-garde Imaginist poem that was first published in 1914. The title is part of the poem, as it creates a scene for the perception of the following lines. The reader must first imagine a metro station crowded with people, then imagine a tree branch with many petals. These images are very vivid but so different that the reader needs some breakthrough in awareness to combine the images.
Pound inherits the Japanese poetic tradition of haiku, which combines everyday things with philosophical insight. The author follows the visual principle of haiku – to create a visible picture of what is happening with short but juicy images. Moreover, the words must be symbolic, emotionally, and intellectually loaded, and evoke an associative array that triggers the process of sensual and emotional comprehension. In the end, haiku often contain a gap that creates a shock effect – most often, this is the destruction of the assembled picture.
It seems that the urban life and nature opposition, as well as tearing the picture with a transition to a completely different image, is a legacy of European intellectualism. The author forces the reader to compare two contrasting worlds – artificial and natural. Wet and lively petals correspond to human faces, and the black line is a dark and dirty subway line. However, the feeling of an overfilled subway with a crowd of sweating people is quite the opposite of a fragrant tree branch wet from dew or rain. This creates a strange feeling because readers find similarities and at the same time understand that these are two radically different environments.