In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

––– Ezra Pound (1913, 1916)

“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 the 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. And that evening… I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found the words, but there came an equation… not in speech, but in little splotches of colour…. The ‘one-image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it…. Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence.”