Apparition of Flood & Verse in 1913

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)

It is the spring of 1913, and crowds are gathering, dispersing, being swept away. In March, the Great Miami River unlearns its geography, rolls its shoulders. People congregate on the tops of houses and trees, or what’s left of them, and wait, and watch. Five days pass — the waters recede. Four hundred and sixty seven people are dead in Ohio (Schmidlin). Cameras roll, capturing the statewide wreckage and devastation. One month later, Poetry publishes a couplet by Ezra Pound, two lines bearing the weight of a passing train. Spring comes to an end as the river rests. A spectacle has been caught on camera, through the poetry on a stark page, the words “apparition” and “petals” and “bough”; with the newsreel, the water and their crowds. Here are the images, and here, trained on their likeness, is the public eye, guided by the inevitable trails of flood and ink. Footage of the Great Dayton Flood, followed by two expansive lines of “In a Station of the Metro” — both of these texts act as mirrors of language and history, reflecting in each other a larger desire to understand the presence and persistence of human nature among overwhelming upheavals of natural and cultural change.

The Great Dayton Flood newsreel distills images of the statewide disaster, contextualized by the clashing of environmental elements usually associated with life and rebirth: the season of spring and the necessity of water. In the newsreel footage, shots of the flood’s destruction appear on screen for several seconds at a time, but are regularly interrupted by title cards, thirty in total, that explain the context and contents of each image. The five-day ordeal is condensed into a series of flashing visuals that relays reality with a measured, calculated hand, or eye. The footage is just under seven minutes long. It ends with a title card that features a short poem by Bayard Taylor: “Get courage, brothers! We trust the wave, / with God above us, our guiding chart / so, whether to harbor or ocean grave, / be it still with a cheery heart.” Footage of the disaster prompts its survivors to reflect and find comfort in poetry as a battle cry, and in the healing qualities of community, solidarity, religion, and humility. Strangers become “brothers,” and a site of catastrophe becomes a site of rejuvenation. By calling the community to action, the newsreel attempts to reconfirm human agency and productivity despite the uncontrollable destruction brought by natural disasters. Separate faces and figures are indistinguishable in the newsreel footage, but groups of people, of “Our Boys in Camp” (5:13) and of “Heroes of the Flood” (6:19), do not require singular recognition. The greater community has taken precedence over the individual, turning tragedy into a celebration of necessity.

As the floodwaters in Ohio continue to recede, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is published, a micro-reflection that, like the flood footage, distills the crowd and the seasons into measured images. But while the newsreel footage of the Great Dayton Flood combines moving images and text (and poetry) to produce an artifact of hope and transition, Pound’s poem, only fourteen words long, is otherwise self-contained and static on a sheet of paper. Foucault reconciles such disparate texts in The Order of Things, asserting that “the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the Same — of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities” (xxiv). The “identities” generated by the newsreel and the poem originate from a desire to comprehend how groups of people might be inherently connected both in spite of and as a result of natural causes. The “apparition” of Pound’s poem materializes amorphously into a “crowd,” then tangibly into a layer of “petals.” They are separate but also brought together by the adhesion of a “wet, black bough,” a remnant of a spring shower — or perhaps of a more destructive storm. The petals may or may not be of one kind, just like the individuals in the crowd, but together they create an illusion of sameness, contrasted against the fluctuating nature of their environment. There is devastation here, scaled down to a single image, settled deeply and fleetingly in the linear abstractions of poetic verse.

The poem is quiet and the newsreel silent as each attempts to capture humans both in relation to one another and against the larger backdrop of nature and its destructive moods. Both texts, despite differences in their mode and content, convey the singularity of the human experience on a more comprehensive and collective level of existence. The newsreel reins itself in with overlays of textual conversation, while the poem contains itself with a small number of words plucked for the page. They seek balance and order, searching for some point of stability among the dualities of an environment that nourishes as well as it consumes.

WORKS CITED

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” Poetry. Apr 1913.
Schmidlin, Thomas. “1913: Statewide Flood.” Ohio History. Ohio Historical Society. 2006. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
“Unique early newsreel footage of the 1913 Flood that devastated Dayton, Ohio.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 8 Sept. 2012. Web. 30 Apr 2014.

❀ Awarded the Wallace Stevens Memorial Prize in 2016.
❀ Originally written for a Literary Theory course I took during my spring semester of 2014.