| 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: |
(2-3) |
| Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, |
|
| Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. |
5 |
| 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. |
10 |
| 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: |
15 (14-15) |
| 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, |
20 |
| 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, |
25 |
| Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: |
|
| In the slow float of different light and deep, |
|
| No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, |
|
| Nothing that's quite your own. |
|
| Yet this is you |
30 |
