OUR mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
- London has swept about you this score years
- And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
- Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
- Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
- Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else.
- You have been second always. Tragical?
- No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
- One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
- One average mind--with one thought less, each year.
- Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
- Hours, where something might have floated up.
- And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
- You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
- And takes strange gain away:
- Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
- Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
- Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
- That might prove useful and yet never proves,
- That never fits a corner or shows use,
- Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
- The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
- Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
- These are your riches, your great store; and yet
- For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
- Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
- In the slow float of differing light and deep,
- No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
- Nothing that's quite your own.
- Yet this is you.
| "Portrait d'une Femme" is reprinted from Ripostes of Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound. London: Elkin Mathews, 1915. |
