Revised Essay

Have you ever had a dream where you sitting somewhere waiting for something to happen? It is a place that you know, you have been before, it is natural to be there but you can’t pinpoint the exact location of where you are. You can see yourself sitting in a bench, maybe standing. There are people all around you but you don’t know who any of them are. You can be anywhere a garden, house, or even a metro. “In a station of the metro” is a poem that explains the end of life and how something or someone can move on to the stage of life. This can be just like a dream you have any other night. You see yourself waiting at a metro station for something to happen, you are dreaming of a metro station. One can see the death explained in the poem by the meaning of the words of the poem, by the rhyme it takes, and by the lines and symbols it uses.
The poem gives the meaning of life coming to an end by the wording itself. The first line states “The apparition of these faces in the crowd,” meaning that there is ghostlike figures standing around waiting at the metro station. When you imagine apparitions you can imagine white ghostlike figures sitting, standing crowded at the metro station waiting, just waiting. What are they waiting for? It can be interpreted in many ways but one of the things that they can be waiting for is the next time in life, the afterlife. They can be waiting for the train to arrive to take them to the next stage, the new life that they will start. This is a train that people wait for after the die, the spirits. The apparitions are the spirits of the people that have died and are waiting to move on.
The second line states “ Petals on a wet, black bough,” in other words the petals have fallen to the tree. The flower that once might have been beautiful has died and has lost its petals. These petals then can be seen on the black wet tree. The tree is black, which can mean that somehow the time of season is winter. Winter is the time where all the leaves have fallen off the tress and it starts getting cold. By putting these ideas one can get that it is the time of coldness and death. This all gives the definition of what death is and how it comes to be. Its something so beautiful coming to life and dying. The flower started as a seed planted on the ground, where it was watered an taken care of then it grew into a beautiful flower then winter came and the wind and rain that it carried with it ended up killing the flower. Slowly the flower lost its petals, which then fell on the tree. This whole scene can be pictured next to the crowd in the metro station as a sign of life and death. Symbolizing the death that came to the crowd in the metro station.
The poem only consists of two lines one stanza. The shortness of the poem can go with the theory of life and death. Life can be short and in one instant one can die. Death comes to many people faster than one can imagine. The poem makes more of an emphasis with it being short and to the point than it would have with it being long and to dragging. It can also be seen as one of the symbols of the poem.
The symbols of the poem show the relationship death has to the poem. One of the symbols is the word black. Black has always been portrayed as the “bad” color. Black is known to bring darkness to wherever you have that color. If you are sitting in a room painted black, with no light, you are standing in complete darkness compared to standing in a room painted with a different color. Darkness can be connected with death, when you die you are left in complete darkness, with nothing else left in life. Along with black, apparition can be a symbol for death. Apparitions go along with ghosts, and paranormal stuff. You can come to realize that the crowd is somehow the spirits of people. All of this goes side to side with death and an after life.
To use the word bough instead of tree gives another good illustration of the meaning of the poem. The word bough gives it a darker feeling then the word tree. Tree is a word that everyone uses when describing parts of nature. The idea of nature is always connected to trees. This point brings a positive vibe and makes a scene more beautiful and serene, whereas a negative synonym like bough does not. The word bough, not only helping it rhyme with the last word in the first line but it gives the poem the sense of darkness to the tree, that the tree would not have if only using that word itself. The word bough is not used by many and not really known by just hearing the word itself it gives you a darker image from the start, a more disturbed idea of that moment in time.
The meaning of the poem at the end suggests death and the waiting for it or even the coming to it. The words of the poem can easily be translated to mean anything you want them to mean but the words in this poem reflects some sort of darkness to the world that Pound is trying to illustrate. The poem uses its symbolic words, the translation of the lines, the poems length to help translate the meaning of the poem as a whole. It brings death to a fulfilling circle. It explains it in many ways and is able to illustrate it in a perfect way. Overall the poem gives the sense of death and waiting for it to come and to pass to a new life. Gives a whole new meaning to that dream you have at night when you where waiting for what you are really not sure what it is. It gives being at a metro station a whole new meaning.