’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.”
This stanza is from "The Tay Bridge Disaster," the most famous of the many works of Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall. Far from being your average Victorian rhymester, McGonagall was hilariously untalented, yet curiously, he was stubbornly convinced that he was a genius. Over a century later, his claim to fame is that he remains the worst poet ever to misuse the English language.
Despite the fact that "The Tay Bridge Disaster" is about a railway accident that killed 90 people in 1879, its eight uneven stanzas, like all of McGonagall's work, overflow with unintentional humor. In the last stanza of this poem, he turns to the popular Victorian habit of catchy moralizing. Yet instead of promoting a good character trait, he preaches about...buttresses.
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 with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
His work is priceless--not because it's witty or satirical, but because it's just plain bad. Yet McGonagall, as I have already said, was oblivious to this. He hard-hardheadedly pursued his art ever since he was seized with a strong sense of inspiration. In his autobiography, he writes:
"...all of a sudden my body got inflamed, and instantly I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I thought I heard a voice crying in my ears-'WRITE! WRITE.'"
And write he did, against all odds, amassing fans as well as his share of haters along the way. Had he lived in today's world, he would have become a meme. In addition to writing verse, he fancied himself an actor. For his debut on the stage, he portrayed Macbeth in small-town theater, although the owner required him to pay for the role. McGonagall's friends turned out in droves, hoping to be entertained by seeing him make a spectacle of himself. And they were not disappointed, for he enjoyed the attention so much, he refused to die on his cue, which enraged the actor who was playing MacDuff.
If you think about it, William Topaz McGonagall, the terrible yet passionate actor and poet, is pretty inspiring. What if we all had the confidence to do what we love without caring what others think?
