That is so.
Then, beginning to feel his feet, as the saying is, he ventured into deeper water:
Though to catch your drift I’m striving,
It is shady—it is shady.
(He repeated “it is shady” to give him time to think of the next rhyme, though he pretended that the repetition was part of the structure of the verse.)
I don’t see at what you’re driving.
Mystic lady—mystic lady!
Having discovered that this sort of rhyming was much easier than it appeared at first sight to be, he determined to show her that other people were just as smart as she was, and (if you come to that) even a little bit smarter.
So he began:
Though I’m anything but clever,