Tuesday I forgot to drink coffee. I never forget this and I am amazed to have done so, although the reason was that the gas man and the electrician had come early to work on the stove. It has taken me until now to feel somewhat normal, two or three cups of coffee this morning and somehow they just set in – not to wake me up, but to settle the headache.
Suffering therefore from a lack of diplomatic feeling in class, I did not finesse a disagreement about a text. Normally I would have turned the attention of the class somewhere else and evaded discussion of this issue since it is too advanced an issue for this class, but not having done this I looked up articles on it and learned something new about the poet in question and also about an Ezra Pound poem.
It is a misogynist poem in its way but I did always like the words of it, the vistas and movement in it, the way it leads sight.
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 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,
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.
That was “Portrait d’une femme,” from Ripostes (1912).
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 