Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound

Amy Lowell uses imagery in “The Pike” to describe the pike and its surroundings by vividly illustrating how an unnoticed pike does what it always does and then one day becomes increasingly noticeable by simply flicking its tail and changing how its movement is seen about through the dark and muddy water.  In the poem, the fish that Lowell is referring to is the pike, or various superficially similar fishes.   This pike is hidden beneath the shade of the reeds and it is very difficult to see the pike among the stems, and the fish goes unnoticed.  However, once the fish flickers its tail, its green and copper luster runs beneath the water and is now visible through the reeds.  The pike’s bright colors could even be seen on the opposite banks.  To me, the pike is symbolic of human nature.  It is very common for people to go about their daily lives in the same way every day and in doing so, it’s as if they’ve become hidden and not noticeable to others and just the flick of their tales can dramatically change everything.  Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is perhaps imagery at its finest.  Pound wrote that after riding on a metro train in Paris, he saw a beautiful face followed by another beautiful face, and then another, and another, and another.  He tried to put his sight of these beautiful faces into words, but failed to do so because he just couldn’t find the right words to describe them.  Nothing seemed worthy of recounting the beauty he had seen or the sudden emotion he had felt.  After several attempts and still finding nothing, Pound unexpectedly found the expression rather than the words.  In the first sentence of the poem, Pound describes seeing their faces through the crowd.  It illustrates us as humans going about their daily lives.  The second sentence refers the faces to flower petals after the rain, which in nature symbolizes life.  However, the “black bough” shows the exact opposite of the beauty of flowers in the rain: death.  Like the beautiful flower petals, everything comes to an end.  The combination of these two sentences, as contrasting as they both are, symbolizes that even through humans are different from certain elements in nature (such as petals and rain), we eventually all suffer the same fate.