The Beginner

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After He Has Been Extemporising On an Instrument Not Of His Own Invention - Browning


Lo! What is this that I make - sudden, supreme, unrehearsed -
This that my clutch in the crowd pressed at a venture has raised?
Forward and onward I sprang when I thought (as I ought) I reversed,
And a cab like martagon opes and I sit in the wreckage dazed.

And someone is taking my name, and the driver is rending the air
With cries for my blood and my gold, and a snickering news-boy brings
My cap, wheel-pashed from the kerb. I must run her home for repair,
Where she leers with her bonnet awry-flat on the nether springs!

© Rudyard Kipling