Importance of Word " Petals" in the Poem " at the Metro of the Station " by Ezra Pound

                                    The importance of the word " Petals"

In the poem " At the metro of the station " by Ezra Pound.

Each word in this poem has a significant deep meaning. Each of them allows  us  imagine a scene while reading the lines. The word "Petals" that shown in the second line of the poem,which describe a view from the nature life , has a concept of some thing pretty  and beautiful, which this  meaning is related to the nature and beauty.from this perspective we can say that the Petals can represent, that on the dark metro platform, the people look like flower petals stuck on a tree branch after a rainy night . The word "Petals" review ideas of something soft, and beauty which contrasts with the bleakness of the "wet, black bough". we  can conclude that the petals are similar to the faces that appear in the metro station .But the flower does not bloom in the sunshine but appear on a wet, black bough, which signify the weather of sadness and death. This implies that we human beings may be so. We will die one day. So in this sense, we can see that on the one side ,there is the  beauty of the  life, in the other side there is  the death of  life, which combine to make a tragedy..In another sense, we can see that we human being create the most advanced kind of life including the metro, we are different from the nature, but at the final point, we are the same, living in the shadow and light, and one day will disappear. This adds more sadness to the poem.

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne C. "Telling and Showing." The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. 3-22.