Ezra Pound's poetry is very significant in the way that a lot of his works feel like a narrative with a meaning behind it. In the poem "Portrait d'une Femme", Pound paints a very vivid picture for his reader and is anything but discreet when it comes to telling the story within his poem. "In a station of the Metro", Pound uses two lines to portray a picture of a Paris subway. But is it really? To the common reader this could mean a lot of different things. Well let's take a closer look. "The apparition of these faces in the crowd." The common consensus is that the poet is simply seeing different faces within the station. Well yes, this is true, but if the faces are blended together, wouldn't that mean that the station would in fact appear crowded? On to the next line, Pound recites "Petals on a wet, black bough." This line, in fact, takes us to back to the first line. It simply describes the faces of the people. I can't say I'm exactly sure what the author is getting at but it seems as though he's telling the audience of the gloominess of the subway station. After reading this, I turn to the next page to find that the poem has ended. This came as a disappointment personally because Pound did an amazing job drawing his audience in just two lines. You could actually dwell on these two lines for a while and still come up with different ideas of what they mean. So why isn't there more to the story? He definitely left me in the middle of the subway station without a ticket on this one.
George Murray recently submitted a few poems to lemonhound recently and one of them appeared as a simple narrative to the common reader. "Proper Punctuation" being the poem, it sets up a stage of something that's about to happen and is situational. Compared to Pound's two line poem, this one just isn't as formal and seems to be "dumbed down" to a sense where it doesn't make you think at all. Of course, the writer had his own style and his own message he was trying to give with his form but it's no where near the craftiness of Pound. http://lemonhound.com/2014/02/28/george-murray-three-poems/