Ezra Pound's Sargasso Sea
In honor of the 136th birthday of Ezra Pound, I want to rhapsodize about him and “Portrait d’une Femme,” one of my favorite poems of his, which I’m sharing with you below.
Such a birthday sounds Biblical in its length, like the 175 years of age reached by Abraham at his death. And I have been claiming Pound as a patriarch for 50 years, regardless of his anti-Semitism and treasonous behavior during World War II. He has been my favorite poet since I began to search for a place in the art in the early 1970s, and he still is.
In Pound, I found a poetry so vast as to encompass all other poetries and a voice that sounded, despite all its variations, like the authentic voice of the poetry of the past. In him, I imagined that I heard the Anglo-Saxon bards, Homer, Confucius, Dante, the Cid, and Chaucer and Browning and Whitman. It’s true that they are figments of the imagination Pound planted in my mind, and that the voices I heard in his poetry are not really the voices of those poets but the product of Pound’s great gift of impersonation.
To this day, I can forgive the man his vile hatreds of my people and my country because he gave me access to the great sweep of poetry. The inclusiveness of his work has superseded for me the bigotries of his life. And I still find his ear as fine and his language as convincing as those of any poet who has succeeded him—and of many who preceded him.
To echo that memorable first line of “Portrait d’une Femme,” Pound’s poetry has been my Sargasso Sea—but in a much more productive way than that of the lady whose portrait the poet is verbally painting. I and many other readers have found riches that are quite our own, unlike the subject of the poem, for whom nothing is quite her own.
When I was first encountering the poem those many years ago, it was the pungency of statement and the resonance of certain lines—in short, the language—that thrilled me: the first and last lines, for example, and “Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else”; “One dull man, dulling and uxorious,/One average mind—with one thought less, each year”; and “You are a person of some interest, one comes to you/And takes strange gain away.” That great word “uxurious,” (“excessively fond of or submissive to a wife”), damning that poor dull man with a statement as if from on high, can almost be said to be a poem in itself.
Reading the poem afresh today, I am struck by aspects of its artistry that I missed as a callow youth. The metaphor of the lady as the Sargasso Sea is masterfully extended throughout the poem, sometimes advancing with reference to the actual stuff a diver may find at the bottom of the sea (“For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,/Strange woods half sodden”), sometimes retreating to a subtler marine reference (“I have seen you sit/Hours, where something might have floated up.”)
Overall, the structure of the comparison is richly suggestive and paradoxical. The Sargasso Sea—famously a mysterious and dangerous place in which ships may be trapped in seaweed for centuries—is a region of the Atlantic Ocean bounded by four currents forming a larger circulating current called a “gyre.” (Gyres referring more to circulating air, of course, were a central symbol in the cosmology of Yeats, for whom Pound worked for a time as a secretary.)
Like the ocean gyre of the Sargasso Sea, London society swirls around the lady, depositing the detritus of urban civilization (“Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things) in its wake. By means of its central conceit, the poem spans a vast geography of sea and city while containing its subject within the tight frame of a portrait.
One other thing that’s noticeable about the poem to me now is the metrical instrument on which Pound rings his characteristic variations. Famous as one of the great inventors of free verse in American English, Pound in this poem unobtrusively deploys blank verse—the unrhymed iambic pentameter that Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and many others down to the present day have famously used.
But Pound, following his famous motto, “make it new,” makes the old meter sing in ways that are unique to him, varying from a fairly standard iambic line like the first one (“Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea”) to ones that unconventionally start and stop, lurching forward as they gather up the random bits of the modern world (“Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,/Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.”)
In a way I find stirring, the poem concludes with an assertion of the authenticity of the lady herself, despite her inability to claim anything of value for her own. “Yet this is You,” Ezra Pound writes, with characteristic directness and authenticity, breaking apart the last line for emphasis.
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Portrait d'une Femme
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.