The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 3/27/06)

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.

Ezra Pound

********************

RL

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

:hi:

this is one of the greatest.

i love pound -- and love what he did for poetry.

just wonderful!

you must be feeling ok?

that's a fairly ''positve'' poem for pound.
{i use ''positive'' loosely -- i don't always think of poetry as personal compasses for emotional happiness -- i don't even very often think they are about that}

Yeah, I am, actually.

:hi:

RL

It feels good to be back in your thread this "hour in the loom of days" (what a lovely line that is).

I wasn't myself for a while; now that I am it is great to see you. :hi:

I've missed you...

:hi:

RL

flowing back into the sea....such a peaceful feeling I get from this one
:hi:

:hi: