Portrait dune Femme Ezra Pound Presenter Frances 1

Portrait d’une Femme Ezra Pound Presenter: Frances 1

Ezra Pound (1885~1972) 2

Portrait d’une Femme • The title: portrait of a lady • Recalls Henry James’s novel “Portrait of a Lady. ”(1881) 3

Portrait d’une Femme Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea 1, London has swept about you this score year And bright ships left you this or that in fee: Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things 2, Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. 4

Portrait d’une Femme 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 thoughtless, each year. 5

Portrait d’une Femme 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 fishes up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, 6

Portrait d’une femme Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else That might prove useful and yet never proves, That never fits a corner or show use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old works; 7

Portrait d’une femme 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. 8

Who is the lady? A: Modern Londoner • Form: Blank Verse • Theme: 1. person without spiritual power soul—the Sargasso Sea sea 2. her knowledge are fragmentary • Symbol of London: a international big cities which collects various stuff. It has its own attraction but it can not give people any unforgettable impression 9

Works Cited "Literature works: Portrait d`une Femme. " Literature and Culture Teaching Database (文學與文 化教學資料庫). 2004. Hermes Database Project 匯文 網資料庫計畫. 15 Apr, 2006 < http: //hermes. hrc. ntu. edu. tw/lctd/asp/works/work. a sp? no=44>. "Mandrake (plant). " Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Apr 2006, 03: 25 UTC. 15 Apr 2006, 07: 03 <http: //en. wikipedia. org/w/index. php? title=Mandrak e_%28 plant%29&oldid=47747079>. 10

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea…(1) “As the Sargasso collects seaweed, so this woman has, after twenty years of backwash from London’s social currents, accumulated the flotsam and jetsam which makes her, paradoxically, both a “richly paying” institution in the eyes of the young and an impoverished self whose only interest is as repository of this “sea-hoard. ” (Christine Faula, A Guide to Ezra Pounds Selected Poems) Back 11

The mandrake “Their roots, because their curious bifurcations cause them to have a semblance to the human figure (male & female), have long been used in magic rituals” (Mandrake ). Symble of male power Back 12