Carver and Pound's Poems

The first poem I read was Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." After my initial reading, I was fairly confused on what the author was trying to convey from the couplet. I looked up the exact definition of apparition, which came out to be "a supernatural appearance of a person or thing, esp. a ghost." This helped me figure out the what I believe the author is trying to tell the audience.

From the title, it seems like the speaker is in some kind of metro station. He describes seeing an "apparition of faces in the crowd" (line 1). This implies that the reader is not looking merely at each face from a mere physical standpoint, but instead he sees them as a singular enmity. This idea is further shown from the second line in which the speaker describes the faces as "petals on a wet, black bough" (line 2). A bough defined is a branch of a tree. So, by saying that the faces represent the petals on a bough, the author is saying that every human face each makes up a part of something bigger. The faces are all parts of a human mosaic, a large melting pot of different people, thrown together to form one picture.

The second poem, "Photograph of My Father In His Twenty Second Year" by Raymond Carver, offers a somber look at the relationship between a son and his father. In the first line, the author uses the phrase, "dank, unfamiliar kitchen" to allude to the fact that the speaker has not been in the kitchen for a while, suggesting that the author is perhaps a young man who has already moved out of the house (Line 1).

The author then describes a picture of his father that he finds in the kitchen. The next eight lines or so are devoted to thoroughly describing the picture of his young father. The initial descriptions seem fairly objective until the last line of the second stanza, in which the speaker tells us that "all his life my father wanted to be bold" (Line 10). The next stanza shows the speaker's mixed feelings about his father. He states that he does indeed love his father, and yet he realizes that his father has many faults, including a sore lacking of boldness, apparently. Also, the speaker's lack of knowledge of a fishing hole tends to point to his father perhaps ignoring his son, not spending much time with him.

I think many people, including myself, can relate to this poem. Many children grow up idealizing their fathers, thinking of their parents as ideal individuals with little or not fault. As they grow, however, people begin to realize that their fathers are normal human beings with faults, some with more than others. The speaker in this poem struggles with his father's failures in his life. He still loves his dad, but he still has trouble accepting his father's various weaknesses. After perhaps idealizing him as a child, the son has to come to terms with who his dad really is.