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

Ezra Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” emerged from his experience in Paris, where he was struck by a sudden, vivid perception of faces in the Métro. Pound later described struggling to render the moment in a longer draft before compressing it into an imagist “equation” of image and emotion. The poem became a touchstone of Imagism—Pound’s early-1910s movement advocating precision, concision, and direct treatment of the thing—showing how a modern urban scene could be distilled into a single, resonant juxtaposition.

The poem captures a fleeting urban epiphany: anonymous faces briefly “appear” out of the crowd like a vision, then vanish. By likening them to “Petals on a wet, black bough,” Pound fuses human presence with a natural image, turning the métro’s dark, rain-slicked modernity into a stark backdrop against which fragile beauty stands out. The semicolon functions like a hinge, presenting not a logical explanation but an imagistic equivalence—two perceptions held in tension. The effect is both aesthetic and emotional: a momentary recognition of individuality and delicacy within mass movement and industrial darkness.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

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

1) “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
2) Title often given as “In a Station of the Metro” (US spelling) vs. “In a Station of the Métro” (with accent).
3) Punctuation/spacing varies by edition (e.g., line break after “crowd;” and differing dash/colon usage in some reprints).