【VIP专享】英语诗歌欣赏期末论文In a Station of the Metro

2010级英语五班

温丽君

201003010530 The Imagery Analysis of In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Imagery is the consolidation of imagination and impression of beauty left for readers; It is the image demonstrated by author’s thoughts and emotion through verbal media. Therefore, we can define imagery as a kind of visual reflection.

In the poetry of In a Station of the Metro, one of the most impressive characteristics of artistic expression is image superposition characterized by intuitiveness which links metaphor and images together to produce a variety of special and unique artistic effect. In the poetry of In a Station of the Metro, the image of “apparition of faces” in the first line echoes to “petals on a bough” in the second line. Such kind of image superposition contains profound thoughts and leaves us an unmeasured mental space to imagine the information and emotion hidden in this poetry.

These two sets of images in front of us have describes such a picture like: After a heavy rain, the sky was gloomy and grey, the air was humid and filled with the smell of material decadence. A dark and wet subway

station was standing in a corner of the city. People in this station were crowd and silent, moving mechanically without any communications with others. Some of them seemed to be alert, some seemed to cunning and some seemed to be indifferent with everything, without any face expression. Suddenly, there appeared innocent faces of children as good as petals, they were hand in hand with each other and sing along with their songs…The poet was pleasantly surprised and refreshed by these faces.

And in this poetry, there are two lines with all together fourteen words and except for the words like: in, these, of, a, the, on, there are mainly five nouns and two adjectives. It produces four images with two images in the first line and another two in the second line.

In the first line, there are the two images: “face” and “crowd”. “Face” is the carrier of “apparition”, and it is the bright spot in the crowded subway station. The “face” under the foil of “apparition” looks like the lotus in the mud. And the second image is the “crowd” which presents the scene of the poetry----subway station. In this crowded station where people comes and goes in a hurry, the only one thing caught poet’s eyes was the faces of the beauty who appeared unimaginably and disappeared hastily. That’s why the author called them “apparition”, since they are so beautiful that the poet cannot believe and disappear so quickly that the port cannot grasp in time.