The Misapprehension Of One Adolph (Harpo) Marx
by @wk-kortas
The classically-trained and symphony-polished,
If someone deigned to listen to their disapprobations,
Would tell all and sundry that he was playing it all wrong;
Indeed, his technique so unsound, his fingering so maladroit
That those who had wrestled with that stringed contraption
Reportedly favored by the angels
For years, indeed decades, at Julliard and Oberlin
Insisted that he couldn’t really play at all
(His opinion of his critics remained unquoted,
Though it was said he tuned his instrument
In such a fashion to ensure that he alone
Could produce notes from it)
Yet every night, in the middle of another knockabout farce,
He would sit alone, under a single light, and pluck away
While the gathering in the seven-fifty tickets sat rapt,
Commutes from Chappaqua and mortgages in Great Neck
Forgotten for the nonce, wholly transported out of themselves
By the shabby- hatted and unruly-mopped figure before them,
Even the cognoscenti and conservatory-bred
Bewitched in spite of themselves,
Though they regarded the strumming
Much differently than the great unwashed in the stalls
(The author of these anomalous tones, being a reticent sort,
Keeping his opinion of them to himself.)