Very few afternoons in my life compare for joy with that on which, when I was about twenty years old, I discovered the poetry of William McGonagall, who was by common consent the worst poet in the English language, and is unlikely ever to be overtaken in the race to the bottom. Indeed, some have made the enlarged claim that he is the worst poet in any language, but this claim would seem to imply or require linguistic abilities beyond even those of Sir Richard Burton. Suffice it to say that, where the English language is concerned, to open a volume of McGonegall on any page is sufficient to convince even the most exacting critic that the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, written of course in another context entirely, are apposite to his verse:
No worse,
There is none.
It was a cloudless summer day and I lay down on the grass with the tartan paper-covered volume printed in Dundee. I did not rise thereafter for between two and three hours, and then had difficulty in doing so. I had laughed so much that I was weak, as if suffering from hypoglycaemia; my legs felt as if my bones had dissolved, leaving the muscles and other soft tissues to support themselves.
Anyone who would demonstrate the superlative badness of McGonagall to those still unacquainted with his work is so spoilt for choice t hat he is likely, if he is not careful, to end up like Buridan’s ass, quite unable to make up his mind between delectations. I shall therefore, without further reflection, quote from two of his best-known works, Address to the New Tay Bridge and The Tay Bridge Disaster. The former apostrophises the new bridge:
Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery
Tay,
With thy beautiful side-screens along your
railway,
Which will be a great protection on a
windy day,
So as the railway carriages won’t be blown
away,
And ought to cheer the hearts of the pas
sengers night and day
As they are conveyed along thy beautiful
railway…
He then praises the designers of the bridge:
Thy structure to my eye seems strong and
grand,
And I hope the designers, Messrs Barlow
and Arrol will prosper for many a day
For erecting thee across the beautiful Tay.
And I think nobody need have the least
dismay
To cross o’er thee by night or by day…
Unfortunately, this last thought proved mistaken, as we learn in the next poem:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry
Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long
time.
The bridge had collapsed and a train had plunged into the river below. McGonagall concludes his dramatic poem with some reflections on engineering:
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the
least dismay,
That your central girders would not have
given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side by
buttresses
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
Yet even as I laughed, a still, small voice—very small, and very still for the present—caused me a faint unease, the veil’d melancholy that always enters the very temple of delight. For the fact is that part of the amusement of McGonagall’s verse or doggerel is that it takes itself very seriously, as McGonagall the man took himself. All of his books are provided with an engraving of him dressed in a checked cape, with a soulful expression on his face and poetically long and flowing hair, and with a subscript in his own handwriting: Faithfully yours, William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian.
Poet and Tragedian: that is how he thought of himself. And I was therefore aware that there was in my laughter something knowing and cruel, a mockery of the defenceless and a sense of my own superiority, none of which was at all pleasan t to contemplate. I dismissed it from my mind.
William McGonagall was a ridiculous, and yet in many ways an admirable figure, worthy of our sympathy, compassion and respect rather than of our disdain. If invincible delusion had not inured him to the cruel insults and practical jokes of his contemporaries, his life would have been truly tragic. But then again, were in not for that invincible delusion—that he was a theatrical and poetic genius unprecedented since the time of Shakespeare—his life would have passed in the utmost anonymity.
He was born in about 1825, the fifth child of poor parents who had emigrated from Ireland to Scotland, where there was a textile boom. Wages were very low, but high enough to make them attractive to impoverished, landless Irish. McGonagall probably received only eighteen months of formal education in his life, before being put to work on handlooms at a very early age, facts that themselves should give us pause for respect. For his letters were written in a firm, clear and almost elegant hand, he wrote grammatically for the most part and his orthography was superior to that of a great proportion, perhaps even of the majority, of modern Britons who have undergone at least eleven years of education. Indeed, it is better than that of many present-day graduates.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, he appears to have developed a passion for the the atre, particularly for Shakespeare. It strikes me as both remarkable and moving that a man who was born into, lived all his life, and died in abject poverty should have attached such value to high culture.
At first he worked in the theatre backstage or as a scene-changer, but then began to obtain parts in an amateur or semi-professional capacity.
He knew whole Shakespeare plays by heart, especially the great tragedies, and eventually obtained starring roles in Dundee, where he lived. What he never realised, because his belief in was his genius was as granitic as his absence of a sense of humour was total, was that he was given these roles for the absurdity of his performances. Here is a description of one of his appearances as Macbeth (his favourite part):
McGonegall as Macbeth refused to die when run through by Macduff; he maintained his feet and flourished his weapon about the ears of his adversary in such a way that there was for some time an apparent possibility of a real tragedy. Macduff, continually telling him to go down became at length so incensed that he gave him a smart rap over the fingers with the flat of his sword. McGonagall dropped his weapon, but dodged and pranced as if to wrestle. Macduff threw his sword side, seized Macbeth and brought the sublime tragedy to a close in a rather undignified way by taking the feet from underthe principal character
The realisation that he was a great poet came to McGonagall in 1877 with the suddenness of a mystical experience, or perhaps a neurological event like a stroke. (These days, he would be put at once into an MRI scanner.) From that time on, he ceased ever to work as a cotton-weaver, deriving an exiguous and precarious living from performances of his own compositions in places such as village halls, public meeting rooms and pubs. His wife begged him to return to cotton-weaving, where the remuneration, while not munificent, was at least regular and more or less calculable in advance. But McGonagall was faithful to his muse to the last, dying in penury in 1902.
The immediate provocation of his conversion to poesy was the death and burial of the Reverend George Gilfillan, who had once provided McGonagall with a testimonial that anyone but McGonagall might have taken as non-committal or lukewarm:
I certify that William McGonagall has for some time been known to me. I have heard him speak, he has a strong proclivity for the elocutionary department, a strong voice, and great enthusiasm. He has had a great deal of experience, too, having addressed audiences, and acted parts here and elsewhere.
McGonagall, however, took this to mean that the Rev. Gilfillan was especially interested in his career, just as later, when Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary wrote t o him to thank him at ‘the Queen’s command’ for the verses he had sent her, returning them with ‘Her Majesty’s regret,’ since it was ‘an invariable rule that offerings of this nature should not be received by the Queen,’ he henceforth believed himself to have been in receipt of the most gracious and personal royal patronage.
McGonagall’s talent was evident the first poem he ever wrote, about the Reverend Gilfillan’s funeral:
The Provost, Magistrates, and Town
Council were in the procession that day;
Also Mrs Gilfillan, who cried and sobbed
all the way
For her kind husband, that was always af-
fable and gay,
Which she will remember until her dying
day.
From then on, he tramped the countryside seeking engagements. He had a ready explanation of why he was often received raucously in pubs, having peas thrown at him and wet blankets pulled over his head, even being forcibly evicted from time to time: it was the hostility of publicans towards his well-known aversion to drink, another subject of his poetry:
Therefore, for this sufficient reason remove
it from society,
For seldom burglary is committed in a
state of sobriety;
And I earnestly entreat ye all to join with
heart and hand,
And to help chase away the Demon drink
from bonnie Scotland.
Moreover, as he explained in one of his autobiographical sketches, the publican was alarmed that a penny given by his listeners to McGonagall was a penny less spent on drink; for ‘a publican is a creature that would wish to decoy all the money out of people’s pockets that enter his house and does not want them to give any of their money away for an intellectual entertainment.’
His autobiographical sketches tell of three main adventures: he visited Balmoral, the Queen’s Scottish residence, in the hope of reciting before her; and he visited both London and New York in the hope of taking both by the storm he thought appropriate to his genius.
He was turned away at Balmoral, despite using the letter returning his poems as an introduction; and in neither London nor New York was he able to persuade any theatre-owner to take him on.
The students of Glasgow University suggested that he try for the post of Poet Laureate; they also sent him a letter, allegedly from Theebaw, King of Burmah, creating him a Knight of the White Elephant for his services to poetry, and McGonagall, then about 60 years old, never realised that it was bogus thereafter styling himself Sir William Topaz McGonagall.
Cruel practical jokes were played on him constantly. In an autobiographical sketch he describes one of them:
I remember another night while giving an entertainment in a certain public house to my admirers, and as soon as the publican found out that I was getting money for giving the entertainment, he immediately wrote a letter and addressed it to me, or caused some one else to do it for him, and one of the waiters gave it to me. As soon as I received it in my hand I gave it to one of the company to read, and before he broke open the letter I told him it was a hoax, in my opinion, got up to make me leave his house; and, my dear friends, it was just as I though—a hoax. I was told in that letter, by particular request, to go to Gray’s Hall, where a ball was held that evening, and, at the request of the master of ceremonies, I was requested to come along to the hall, and recite my famous poem, “Bruce of Bannockburn,” and I would be remunerated for it, and to hire a cab immediately, for the company at the ball were all very anxious to hear me. So I left the public- house, but I was not so foolish as to hire a cab to me to Gray’s Hall. No, my friends, I walked all the way, and called at the hall and shewed the letter to the man that was watching the hall door, and requested him to read it, and to show it to the master of ceremonies, to see if I was wanted to recite my poem, “Bruce of Bannockburn.” So theman took the letter from me and showed it to the master of ceremonies, and he soon returned with the letter, telling me it was a hoax, which I expected.
For McGonagall, there is a moral to this story:
My dear friends, this lets you see so far, as well as me, that these publicans that won’t permit singing or reciting in their houses are the ones that are selfish or cunning.
No matter how much ridicule or even physical abuse McGonagall suffered from his audiences, he never lost faith in himself and always found an explanation for it that allowed him to preserve his self-respect. (On one occasion, ill-treatment stimulated his muse there and then:
‘Gentlemen, if you please,/ Stop throwing peas.’) It was this psychological armour-plating that limited the effects of the cruelty of his audiences, but it was cruelty, and gross cruelty, nonetheless.
There is nothing, after all, to suggest that McGonagall was other than harmless and even kindly. It was a nineteenth century equivalent of paying to see the lunatics in Bedlam, and now when I laugh so heartily at McGonagall’s verses I feel that I am participating in this unfeeling cruelty. Even if the deluded are happy, you do not laugh at their delusions, for there is something intrinsically pitiable about the quality of being deluded.
On the other hand, a world that did not laugh at his verses, or refused to enjoy itself with them out of supersensitivity to his memory, would be a horrible world too. Only a man with a heart of stone, said Oscar Wilde, could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing; and only someone with the most ferocious and frightening self-control could read the following lines, from ‘The Wreck of the Whaler “Oscar,”’ with a straight face, or wish them expunged altogether from the human record:
’Twas on the 1st of April, and in the year
Eighteen thirteen,
That the whaler “Oscar” was wrecked not
far from Aberdeen…
So on the one hand cruelty, and on the other the human necessity to laugh: an irresolvable antinomy of almost Kantian proportions.
There another curious aspect of the reception of McGonagall in his native land. It is not surprising that university students should have recognised the quality of his verse; what is more surprising, and in fact very interesting, is that untutored and perhaps scarcely literate working people in pubs, who had not studied poetry (though they might be familiar with ballads), should have recognised it too. This suggests the wisdom and accuracy of Doctor Johnson’s famous reply to Boswell when Boswell asks him what poetry is, namely=2 0that it is much easier to say what it is not. The habitués of Dundee pubs might not have appreciated Swinburne, say, but they recognised at once McGonagall’s doggerel for what it was.
There is one final irony: McGonagall is so execrable that he is immortal. As it happens, my copy of the only biography of McGonagall, David Phillips’ No Poets’ Corner in the Abbey, once belonged to Hamish Henderson, the Scottish poet and nationalist.
Henderson was an interesting figure. Born illegitimate in 1919, when it was less usual to be so born than it is now, possibly to an aristocratic father, his mother died when he was young and he attended Dulwich school from an orphanage. He went up to Cambridge, and was fluent in several languages, including Gaelic. Though not a believer, he worked for the Quakers to bring German Jews out of Nazi Germany; less admirably, after the war, he allowed his poetry to be used at meetings of the Scotland-USSR Society, and always recognised the ‘greatness’ of Stalin. He was an early translator of Gramsci into English.
When war broke out, he was initially a pacifist, but joined up when he decided that this was a war that had to be fought. He was commissioned an officer, and served in Egypt and Libya; from there he was sent to Italy, and he personally received Marshal Graziani’s surrender.
His best-known work is Elegies For the Dead in Cyrenaica, For Our Own and Others. Published in 1948, it quotes from or makes reference to German, Italian and Gaelic poetry, and perhaps more surprisingly for its date, to the Alexandrian Greek poetry of Cavafy, which was not well-known in Britain at the time.
There is no triumph at the victory in the Libyan desert over the forces of evil: Henderson (still only 29, be it remembered) sees enemy soldiers as human beings, and human events, even on the largest scale, as evanescent and destined for obscurity. Henderson imagines a future airliner flying over the scene of the fighting:
The airliner’s passengers,
crossing without effort the confines
of wired-off Libya, remember
little, regret less. If they idly
inspect from their windows the ennui
of limestone desert
- and beneath them
their skimming shadow –
they’ll be certain
they’ve seen it, they’ve seen all…
And the scene yields them? Nothing.
The Ninth Elegy reminds one of Wilfred Owen’s famous prefatory remark, that the poetry is in the pity:
One evening, breaking a jeep journey at
Capuzzo,
I noticed a soldier as he entered the
cemetery
and stood looking at the grave of a fallen
enemy.
Then I understood the meaning of the
hard word ‘pietas’
20(a word unfamiliar to the newsreel
commentator
as well as the pimp, the informer and the
traitor).
The First Elegy opens with a description of the desert in wartime:
There are many dead in the brutish desert,
who lie uneasy
among the scrub in this land of half-wit stunted ill-will. For the dead land is
insatiate
and necrophilous. The sand is blowing
about still.
Many who for various reasons, or because
of mere unanswerable compulsion,
came here
and fought among the clutching grave
stones,
shivered and sweated,
cried out, suffered thirst, were stoically
silent, cursed
the spittering machine-guns, were
homesick for Europe
and fast embedded in quicksand of Africa
agonized and died.
And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of
the dust.
It takes no great critical acumen, I think, to see that this is better poetry by a fair margin than McGonagall’s. Yet McGonagall’s is far the better-known, for a cruel posterity does not always distribute fame among writers according to literary merit. McGonagall is forever and for everyone, while Henderson is for a small and perhaps ever-diminishing band of cognoscenti.
