Ezra Pound - Portrait dUne Femme

　　Your 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.

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