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 or 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.
Ezra Pound, Portrait d’une femme, 1912.
Gravure de Arthur Loosli, L’envol, 1970.