Portrait d'une 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.