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.
