By Ezra Pound

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.

• Living
• Relationships

Poet Bio

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, grew up near Philadelphia, but lived much of his adult life overseas. In his early career he was the influential and a controversial leader of Imagism and Vorticism. He also championed young writers, including H.D., T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Among his best-known works are “In a Station of the Metro,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and The Cantos, a ranging, lifelong work that expounded his political and economic theories.

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