"In a Station of the Metro"

Ezra Bound's poem "In a station of the Metro" can be as short as two lines and you can still feel the way a poem makes you feel, confused.  A poem always makes you think more than you really want to think, it expresses feelings that you don't really know how to express.  We can start by stating the obvious a poem has lines and stanzas.  There is no rule that states how many stanzas a poem should have but a stanza is composed of 2 or more lines, Bound's poem has two lines making it one stanza long.  You can also read the rhyme that the poem has.  It is made up of near rhyme by the end rhymes.  The words are crowd, and bough which are the last words of each line. 

  We can also get wonderful imagery from the two lines.  Like the first line says "the apparition of these faces in the crowd;"  When the author uses the word apparition one gets the image of ghostlike figures in the crowd, one can also get the mage of a dark, lonely metro station with these ghost like faces waiting.  The second line gives you a second image that brings the first line to whole new meaning. The second line states "Petals on a wet, black bough," it is such a simple line yet it has so much meaning to it.  One can get the image of flower petals on a black tree branch.  This gives the idea of death, something beautiful coming to an end like a tree that once might have been beautiful green is now black and wet, with petals from flower falling on it.  The poem can be interpreted as the end of life, maybe the lives of the faces in the metro.  The metro station can be seen as a stop where people are waiting to continue on a new life a different life.  

If something so small as these two lines can have so much meaning, but one has to search deep down in order to get a meaning out of it, it makes it a poem.  Its the searching, rhyme, and the thinking that one has to do that lets these two short lines become a a poem.