Analysis of Portrait d'une Femme
Ezra Pound 1885 (Hailey) – 1972 (Venice)
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.
Scheme | ABACDEFGAHIJKLKMLENOPQARCSTFUL |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Etheree (23%) |
Metre | 11011100101 1011011111 0111111101 0101101111 1111001111 111111011 1111011 11011101001 1111001 11001111111 1111011111 1011011101 0111111101 1101011101111 011101 10111100010 111100111 101111101 1111001101 1101010111 11110010111 0101010011 100100011 1111011101 1111111001 1111001101 00111100101 1111000101 101111 1111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,265 |
Words | 234 |
Sentences | 14 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 30 |
Lines Amount | 30 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,002 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 232 |
Font size:
Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 17, 2023
- 1:10 min read
- 195 Views
Citation
Use the citation below to add this poem analysis to your bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"Portrait d'une Femme" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/13326/portrait-d%27une-femme>.
Discuss this Ezra Pound poem analysis with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In