The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Set up:

In 1912-1913, Pound embraced Imagism. This was a kind of poetry he had invented that, he proclaimed, had three major criteria: 

• it had to be direct and unornamented, 
• it had to be economical in its language, 
• and it had to be composed in free verse, not in any of the moldy oldie forms of English verse of the past.

"In a Station of the Metro" ticks every last one of these boxes. But it also "Makes It New," by repurposing old forms of poetry.

Pound's short poem provides us with a solid example of how he took an ancient tradition—two actually—and made them into something (yup) new.

The poet wandering in the underworld—the only one alive in a world of the dead—is a familiar theme in Classical poetry. The Latinate word "apparition" signals us that Pound is acting like the poet Virgil or Dante, wandering through a world full of ghosts. Spooky.

This poem also tips its hat to the Japanese literary tradition. Check out those petals on the black bough. Check out the sheer brevity of this piece: Pound is writing a weird version of the nature-centric, notoriously spare haiku.

Pound helped to introduce Asian literature to English speaking readers of poetry, both here and in his 1915 collection Cathay. Good job, Ezra.

This poem totally fits the criteria of Imagism. It is direct, using simple, colloquial words (except for the Latinate word "apparition," which is crucial to the meaning of the poem). To make us visualize this apparition, Pound employs sensory terms that relate to nature: "petals on a wet, black bough."

These words from line two evokes a really concrete, visual image. This contrasts to the abstract metaphor of line one: faces of people waiting for a train on a rainy days look like a throng of "apparitions," or ghosts, like those poets like Virgil or Homer might have described.

The poem is direct and economical in other ways as well. Pound doesn't have time for similes in the poem. He could have said that the faces of people waiting for a train were "like" petals on a tree branch, but instead he creates what he called an "equation," transforming a dark subway tunnel in Paris on a rainy day into a Japanese painting of a delicate branch, or, more relevantly, a Japanese court poem from the 16th century.

How's that for making 16th century Japanese poetry new?

This poem presents us with an idea—that faces in a crowd on a rainy day look like a natural object, the branch of a tree in springtime, plastered with bright flower petals—and also the emotional associations connected with such a realization.

Pound is pretty delighted with his comparison, and wants us to be, too. When poetry can be made new, the world can be made to look new.