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.