The unnamed speaker of "In a Station of the Metro" is presumably Pound himself, who lived in Paris and frequented Paris Metro's Concorde station. In an interview, Pound described the poem as his attempt to record the exact moment when his outer life transformed into his inner life. These kinds of moments were, for Pound, of intense emotional and spiritual significance. He was deeply concerned with the moment when one's internal life took over one's external life. The poem reflects this concern with admirable economy, demonstrating how seamlessly faces transform to petals at the beckoning of the imagination. Thus, Pound's narration betrays his conflicted relationship with reality as such. What is more real: the imagination or the world? For Pound, the answer is unclear.

Some scholars suggest that Pound's description of "petals on a wet, black bough" was inspired by a painting by Suzuki Harunobu, titled "Woman Admiring...