The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

How did you do? Well enough to be driven on to complete a few verses? As it happens and as perhaps you already knew from the moment I mentioned the River Tay, a poem was written on this very catastrophe by William McGonagall.¹⁰ It remains the work for which he is best known: his masterpiece, if you will. I am too kind to you and to his memory to reproduce the entire poem:

The Tay Bridge DisasterBeautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!Alas! I am very sorry to sayThat ninety lives have been taken awayOn the last Sabbath day of 1879,Which will be remember’d for a very long time.’Twas about seven o’clock at night,And the wind it blew with all its might,And the rain came pouring down,And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,And the Demon of the air seem’d to say–‘I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.’When the train left EdinburghThe passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,But Boreas blew a terrific gale,Which made their hearts for to quail,And many of the passengers with fear did say–‘I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay’So the train sped on with all its might,And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,And the passengers’ hearts felt light,Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,And wish them all a happy New Year.…

(Burma’s last monarch). Sadly, many believe this was one of many cruel hoaxes perpetrated on the unfortunate poet.I must now conclude my layBy 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 with buttresses,At least many sensible men confesses,For the stronger we our houses do build,The less chance we have of being killed.

Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse. His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it. It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.

I will not linger long on why it fails so spectacularly: it must surely be apparent to you. The metre of course is all over the place. Even if this were accentually written like a music hall turn, folk ballad or other non-syllabic rhythmic verse, there is no discernible pattern of three-stress, four-stress or five-stress rhythm at work. The poem is arbitrarily laid out in stanzas of five, six, six, five, six, eight, nine and thirteen lines which create no expectations to fulfil or withhold. This in part contributes to its overall narrative slackness.

We have lots of Tay rhymes: say, midway, dismay, lay, bray. There are night, might, sight and moonlight; known/blown, down/frown, gale/quail and build/killed.

There is, however, excruciating para-rhyme laid on for our pleasure. Edinburgh/felt no sorrow forces a rather American Edin-borrow pronunciation, or else surrer for sorrow. Buttresses/confesses will never be a happy pair, nor is the repeated seventy-nine/time assonance at all successful. If you are going to assonate, much better to do it within the verse, not on the last line of a stanza, as we saw with the Zephaniah poem.