Two Lines

     Throughout our study of poetry over these past several weeks we have encountered many different poems. There are two that we've encountered which are so short that they are made up of only two lines. David Ferry's "At the Hospital" and Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" are both great poems, and they show that a lot can be said by only saying few words.

     In David Ferry's "At the Hospital," the speaker says, "She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last, / Its blurred grammar finally clarified." That is the extent of the poem, and despite it being so short it still holds a lot of meaning and resonates with the reader. The word cancer alone can hook the reader in a way that other words can't, and tone of the poem can almost send chill down your spine. The comparison of cancer and this person's life to a sentence is an odd metaphor, but it works. You can see that once the sentence ends, the person loses her life to the cancer. The "grammar" is clarified, as before it was uncertain if this person would beat the cancer or not.

     In Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," the speaker states, "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." The speaker is sitting in a metro station, seeing hundreds of people passing by and living out their daily lives. It makes you think of all the people in the world and the lives they lead, which to them are the most important thing in the world. But by comparing them to petals it is implied how fragile they all are, and how insignificant their existence is in the overall scheme of humanity. The only thing that kept me from writing my paper on either of these poems is simply the length, but they are still powerful poems.