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Ezra Pound - 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.

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Added: Feb 20 2003 | Viewed: 41056 times | Comments and analysis of Portrait d'Une Femme by Ezra Pound Comments (8)

Portrait d'Une Femme - Comments and Information

Poet: Ezra Pound
Poem: Portrait d'Une Femme
Year: Published/Written in 1912
Poem of the Day: Jul 18 2010

Comment 8 of 8, added on December 24th, 2010 at 11:04 PM.
Portrait

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
Sargasso Sea

— n
a calm area of the N Atlantic, between the Caribbean and the Azores. It seems to me the Sargasso Sea is lucky to be if London was sweeping around the sea. No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing thats quite your own.
Yet this is you.
The Sargasso Sea is lucky London said there is nothing!

Sheryl Skoglund from United States
Comment 7 of 8, added on March 2nd, 2010 at 10:50 AM.

How could this be about Jean Rhys? It was written in 1912 - she wrote her book in 1966. I doubt that she would take an extract of the opening line of a poem insulting her and use it was a title for her book 5 decades later.

mkj from United States
Comment 6 of 8, added on December 6th, 2009 at 9:15 PM.
woman in Portrait d'Une Femme

According to an article published in 2002 in Modernisim/modernity 9.3 pp 389-405 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the woman is more likely Florence Farr [Emery], an actress, a socialist, a theosophist, and a feminist. A more general interpretation of it helps one's understanding of his muse and his regard toward her.

Jessica from United States

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