The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
So reads Ezra Pound’s 1913 Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro,” based on his experience of the Paris subway system. This is a verb-less Imagist poem, which Pound said should equate rather than directly describe. (An aside: when teaching colons and semicolons to my college freshman students, I said colons should suggest A equals B in a sentence, while semicolons should suggest B somehow qualifies or elaborates on A.)
The poem comes to mind sometimes when I am in a crowd. It has taken on a somewhat bitter irony with almost everyone wearing masks in public now. My joke is it makes you wonder whether people are going to look like the hospital staff from The Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” when they take off their Covid-19 masks (and if you haven’t seen that episode, you should). Some people like covering their faces; I have heard some women in the Middle East actually prefer to wear veils and burqas because they prevent the “male gaze.”
“There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” said T.S. Eliot in his 1915 masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (not to be mistaken for “The Love Song of Alfred E. Neuman”). These days it may be more like preparing a Facebook face to meet the Facebook faces that you meet. Our faces are masked when we meet in public now. Romeo and Juliet met at a masked ball, and you know how well that turned out.
Edgar Allan Poe dealt with the issues of masks, plague, and inevitable mortality in his 1842 short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” Prince Prospero and 1,000 privileged guests are holed up in his abbey as refuge from the plague raging outside. They hold a masquerade ball to entertain themselves, but their wild partying can’t prevent their mortal fates.
I am a skeptic about Covid-19. I think the mortality statistics don’t adequately reflect the number of people who have died who were over 70 and/or already had respiratory problems from heavy smoking or other pre-existing conditions. I don’t mean to be callous, but it seems to me there has been some over-reaction because people, like the characters in Poe’s story, have an irrational and futile fear of death. “No one here gets out alive,” as Jim Morrison put it.
