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.