In The Metro

The poem, “In The Metro” shows how much a quick encounter with a woman in the subway effects the male speaker emotionally. Initially, the speaker is recalling seeing “the girl with the shining legs in the metro”(4). The speaker is sad that this encounter didn’t last very long because he recalls that, “she goes her way and I go mine”(4-5). He remembered her disappearing as, “the escalator carried her away”(7). He describes the escalator “as a river”(8), and the girl as “a flower to sea”(8). At the end, he stands in the subway “with a shopping bag dangling from [his] hand”(12), showing how deeply he’s thinking about this quick encounter.