Ezra Pound (b.1885 - d.1972) on 'IN A STATION OF THE METRO' aids the audience with his side of scrutiny, assaying:
The "one-image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
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Above was a kind of piece which inspired Hall's vivid manifestation of the outward-in and also responds with the beauty of inductive transformation conceivably pragmatic by his own version of:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO (by Daniel Hall, b.1952 - )
Some kind of trouble up the line somewhere, as yet unannounced, only its subtlest effects having arrived, premonitory. Absence gathers in the bedrock hush of a hall accustomed to an intermittent uproar. Utterly lost, a starling blunders from perch to perch, as if learning to fly, while we sit stiller and stiller, rehearsing our eventual departures. This hardly counts as travel, though, this hive-like circulation, this confluence and divergence of desires. The look we wear, most of us, because of the one woman who sits alone weeping loudly, messily, as if she would never stop, as if she had always been crying -- the look we wear says, I am not even here. Against the wall stand three European boys with heavy packs. One, an Italian, is talking with obvious excitement; his companions listen, each wearing his northern skepticism like an elegant scarf. Behind their eyes, a cold swarm of Aristotle and Hegel, a string theory of critical theories in infinite regression, teeming, ramifying. They glance furtively side to side, awaiting the inevitable opportunity. We wait; the companions wait; only the starling, the weeping woman, and the Italian boy are not waiting, but plunging recklessly ahead, having now so little choice. The rails cannot believe their luck, as their daylong headache begins to ease, tentatively, miraculously; the tunnel blackens and deepens -- or something worse than deepening, for depth implies a limit. Shifting from English to French and back, the boy now and then slips in a word of Italian in his excitement, then blushingly removes it. The sobbing is a bellows, ripping at the air, in and out; scored above it, a weak falsetto wail. The vowel is Russian, maybe, or Irish, the inflection untranslatable. Her hair hangs straight and lusterless, and her eyes are so swollen with tears she looks like the victim of a beating. A fistful of crumpled papers and a photograph. The boy's companions are no longer listening, they've demolished his argument, each in his own mind, and are ready to have at him as soon as he is done. Still virtual, hypothetical, the train is accumulating mass in some other realm, but the rails are singing in an ecstasy of relief. On the stairs, one of a pair of cops points his stick in the direction of the woman; they stand on spread legs, idly wondering whether to move, whether to bother. And then the mildest runner of pain shoots through the rails, gratifyingly familiar, and builds to an excruciating crescendo. In mid-thought, lips parted, the boy looks away from his friends -- everyone looks up, squinting toward the light and ruckus. Everyone but the woman, who folds in around herself, and then flings her arms outward, scattering the pages and the photograph, which in the tumult of arrival fly everywhere, the pavement, the train, the bird, the surging crowd.
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