Wednesday
Because I resumed teaching only a couple of weeks ago after a two-year hiatus, I only recently had the unmasking moment that many experienced months ago–which is to say, the moment when people we’ve gotten to know only through their eyes and voices suddenly reveal their faces. When it happened the first time, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” flashed (or should I say apparated?) into my mind.
Although located in mask-averse Tennessee, private college Sewanee has a strict indoor mask policy (hurrah!), which means that my students are a mystery. After conferencing with one of them on Monday, however, I walked out of the building with her, at which point we unmasked. She looked nothing like I thought she looked. Not better and not worse. Just different.
The same thing happened yesterday when, again, I exited with a student. He is a Pakistani and, in fact, I learned that he looks Pakistani. But again, it came as a shock.
Which brings us to Pound’s poem. While traveling on the Paris metro, Pound apparently experienced one person’s face luminescently shining forth in the anonymous crowd and then another. Seeking to capture the exact moment when a sensory image imprints itself on the imagination, Pound described the experience as follows:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Although the poem is only 14 words long (20 if you count the title), its images catch the mind with an intensity that might be lost if the poem were longer. Pound was dabbling in imagism at the time, a movement that is most linked with poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Everything depends on the vivid contrasts in the poem, whether between petals and bough or between an urban crowd and a nature image.
In my own case, my students’ revealed faces contrasted vividly with their previously masked existence. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for them.
Petals shining forth.
