Portrait D'Une Femme (Portrait of a Lady) by Ezra Pound

Portrait D'Une Femme (Portrait of a Lady) by Ezra Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
Portrait d'une Femme 1Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, 2 London has swept about you this score years 3And bright ships left you this or that in fee: 4 Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, 5Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. 6 Great minds have sought you -- lacking someone else. 7You have been second always. Tragical? 8 No. You preferred it to the usual thing: 9One dull man, dulling and uxorious, 10 One average mind -- with one thought less, each year. 11Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit 12 Hours, where something might have floated up. 13And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay. 14 You are a person of some interest, one comes to you 15And takes strange gain away: 16 Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; 17Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, 18 Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else 19That might prove useful and yet never proves, 20 That never fits a corner or shows use, 21Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: 22 The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; 23Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, 24 These are your riches, your great store; and yet 25For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things, 26 Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: 27In the slow float of differing light and deep, 28 No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, 29Nothing that's quite your own. 30 Yet this is you.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Portrait
• D'Une
• Femme
• (Portrait
• of
• Lady)
• by
• Ezra
• Pound