Portrait d'une Femme Wealth Quotes

In these lines the woman certainly sounds pretty wealthy. Idols, ambergris, and rare inlays are pricey things, and the speaker describes the woman as having a "great store." "Store" here probably doesn't mean a place you go to buy things, but rather one's own storage or supply of things. Of course, just a few lines down, the speaker is going to flip back on us and tell us that these riches don't really belong to the woman at all.

Again, this vague word "strange." An interesting essay topic might be to determine what exactly "strange" is supposed to mean in this poem. Here we start to think that maybe this lady isn't so rich after all. She has a "sea-hoard" of things, which we take to mean "a huge amount," but these things are "deciduous" and "half sodden." Breaking apart and soggy? Ick. We're slightly optimistic about the "new brighter stuff," but what exactly is that? Why does the speaker have to be so vague here?

It turns out that the speaker brings up the "new brighter stuff" just to tell us here that, among both the old and new things, the woman doesn't really own any of it. What do you make of the phrase "In the slow float of differing light and deep"? Is the speaker still using sea imagery, has he returned to the city and the lady's immediate surroundings, or is he being deliberately ambiguous?

The structure of this phrase parallels "In the whole and all," so we could read it as meaning the same. In fact, "differing light and deep" is a nice way of saying "whole and all," because "light and deep" recalls two pairs of opposites: light and dark, and high and deep. Notice how "light" and "high" have similar sounds, as do "dark" and "deep." Therefore, the single phrase, "light and deep," manages to recall and encompass an enormous range of meaning.