Study Questions
Understanding & Analysis
	The Metro is the name of the subway system in Paris. This poem, Pound claimed, describes his experience of coming out of a subway car (see Pound's notes in the text). The poem presents, instead of a story about this experience, two images, one in each line. Can you describe in your own words the image in the first line? What are the connotations for each of the important words in that line?  For instance, instead of the "beautiful face[s]" that Pound saw, why does he present "apparition of these faces"? Describe the image in the second line. What are the connotations for each word?  What do they make you feel? What is the relationship between the first line and the second line? Does the punctuation at the end of the first line help you to understand that relationship?  Can "the petals" and "the wet, black bough" be metaphors of anything? What is this poem suggesting about life in the modern world? Look at the web sites below about the literary movement called imagism. What are the characteristics of an imagist poem? In what ways is this poem an example of imagism?
Application & Wild Association
	What does this poem tell us about human perception?  Have you this kind of experience--of transforming a moment into a visual image, or some images? From Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,", "The World is Too Much with Us," Whitman's "I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" (and his other poems), Hardy's "Darkling Thrush", Arnold's "Dover Beach," to "In a Station of the Metro" (1911-1912) and  Yeats' "The Second Coming"(1919) , how is "the world" treated differently? How about nature?  As part of the world, its metaphor, or its opposite?