Appreciation of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”
In a Station of the Metro is an obrvation of the poet of the human faces en in a Paris’s subway station in which the faces turned variously toward light and darkness. The poet, Ezra Pound, was famous for advocating free meter and a more economical u of words and images in poetic expression. He is also one of the leaders of the Imagist Movement of poetry. Written in 1913, In a Station of the Metro is always acknowledged as the best imagist poem.
This poem is in a succinct style which just has 14 words in the whole poem. However, the images in this poem give us the interior meaning. 蹚浑水The images are apparition, faces, petals and bough. He us two lines to describe a vivid picture for us. The first line is narration and the cond is expression. What does the apparition mean? One is “suddenly appear” and the other is “something like the ghost”. This word nicely captures the immediate impression left on the poet’s mind and the powerful emotional impact he felt in that situation. Its association with ghosts also invokes a vivid view of the people coming out of th
e dark Metro as if they are specters ascending from the underground world.antennae>经典英文歌 We can easily touch that the faces in the subway are depresdasia. At this time, Pound saw a child’s lovely face, and then another. All the world ems changed. The lovely faces mixed with the depresd faces. And the poet arous a complex of joy and fear which is hard to tell from each other. Of cour, in this poem, petals indicate faces. When we mention petals, we also think about smiling or some beautiful thing. The subway is just like the bough, although it is wet, dark and black, we still should u love and smiling to face them. Actually, Pound wants to tell us a lot of things in this poem, but he does not offer too many details so that we could havedraken a rich imagination from the images.
Although there just are two lines in this poem, Pound us a lot of figures of speech. I have mentioned that apparition has two means which is a typical pun. The petals obviously indicate the lovely faces, so it is a metaphor. And the first line and the cond line are using the contrast. With the help of figures of speech, the poem is full of Pound’s emotion. In a Station of the Metro is not a metrical poem, but it does not mean there is no musical beauty. Repeating it, you can feel the beauty of music through it’s repetition of dif
ferent vowels and consonants, such as /p/ and /au/. Especially the repetition of /e/ in the cond line emphasizes its n of music.some and any
When we are talking the theme, we must know some background of this poem. It was written in 1913, the First World War was coming. Everyone at that time is under the horrific shadow of the war. Subway is a microcosm of the whole society. The faces there are like apparition and people are so depresd with helpless. But the children’s lovely faces let Pound associate the beautiful petal in natural. Although the bough is wet and black, it has the petals on it. Although the society is depresd and helpless, there is still hope in everybody’s heart. There is no doubt that the lovely face meant a promising future. The poem is just like a mirror which reflects the hopeful song in the soul of human beings.
二
This story was written by Ernest Hemingway.His major works are A Farewell to Arms in 1929,For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 and The Old Man and the Sea in 1952.
I had read two novels of him, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea.Especially The Old Man and the Sea,the story of an old fisherman's journey,his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the a,and his victory in defeat,so I like it very much.
The theme of this story
司令塔This story talks about loneliness.Nada(Nothingness) was an important theme and key word of this story.It consists of three forms: the consciousness of death,the awareness of bitterness and the consciousness of absurdity.And the characters in the story were despaired,depresd and aimless.patrol tyrannosaur what does it mean? To my understanding, the speaker meets her fellow friend, that is another "nobody", when two "nobodies"meet, they can share all their similarities.But the author knows that if there is another "nobody", she isn't a nobody any more. That's why she wroteDon't tell! they'd adverti—you know!
The tone of the author is changed in the cond stanze, she feels confident of being a n
obody, she describs sombody as a frog, It's becau frogs make a lot of noi. The poem says that frogs, though they can croak and make themlves heard and be noticed, are noticed only by "an admiring bog." The bog is the frog's environment, not the frog's friend. So who cares what the bog thinks?
That's what the poem says about being a "somebody" who gets noticed by an admiring public. Frequently, the relationship is impersonal and distanced, not like a real friendship. Somebodies may have many admirers, but they might not be able to make tho personal connections that real friendship offers. As you probably noticed when you read this poem, none of the themes that I discusd in the Overview of Dickinson applies to this poem. My list was not meant to cover every topic Dickinson wrote on, nor does every poem she wrote fit neatly into a category.
Dickinson adopts the persona of a child who is open, naive, and innocent. However, are the questions asked and the final statement made by this poem naive? If they are not, then the poem is ironic becau of the discrepancy between the persona's understanding and view and tho of Dickinson and the reader. Under the gui of the child's accepting
scarfacesociety's values, is Dickinson really rejecting tho values?
Is Dickinson suggesting that the true somebody is really the "nobody"? The child-speaker welcomes the person who honestly identifies herlf and who has a true identity. The qualities make that person "nobody" in society's eyes. To be "somebody" is to have status in society; society, the majority, excludes or rejects tho who lack status or are "nobody"--that is, "they'd banish us" for being nobody.
In stanza 2, the child-speaker rejects the role of "somebody" ("How dreary"). The frog comparison depicts "somebody" as lf-important and constantly lf-promoting. She also shows the fal values of a society (the "admiring bog") which approves the frog-somebody. Does the word "bog" (it means wet, spongy ground) have positive or negative connotations? What qualities are associated with the sounds a frog makes (croaking)?
Is there satire in this poem?
Some readers, who are modest and lf-effacing or who lack confidence, feel validated by this poem. Why? "Success is "
Summary
The speaker says that "tho who ne'er succeed" place the highest value on success. (They "count" it "sweetest".) To understand the value of a nectar, the speaker says, one must feel "sorest need." She says that the members of the victorious army ("the purple Host / Who took the flag today") are not able to define victory as well as the defeated, dying man who hears from a distance the music of the victors.
