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 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