Today marks an important milestone in the memory of a man widely regarded as the worst poet in the history of English. Well, that's not entirely true about the milestone. In fact William McGonagall died on September 29th, 1902. But given that his career was marked by an atrocious disregard for metre, the 104th anniversary of his demise seems about the right time to remember him.
In fairness to McGonagall, there have probably been many worse poets down the centuries. It's just that his brand of awfulness was more memorable than most and was sustained over a longer period. Although he was a mercifully late convert to poetry (he found his vocation in 1877, aged either 47 or 52), he still had a quarter-century to make his mark.
He described that poetic epiphany as "the most startling incident in my life". And for once that was a good choice of adjective, because soon he was startling others. The subject of his debut poem, An Address to the Rev George Gilfillan, said of it truthfully: "Shakespeare never wrote anything like this." Yet, unlike many poets, McGonagall was not cursed with the modicum of talent that would have guaranteed long-term obscurity. He was so bad, as the Book of Heroic Failures puts it deftly, that "he backed unwittingly into genius".
With a certain aptness, he specialised in writing about disasters. Where the early W.B. Yeats drew on Celtic mythology, the late McGonagall drew on shipwrecks, of which at least 20 feature in his work. Conflagrations were another favourite subject. And since Dundee - where he was a weaver - was full of highly flammable textile warehouses, his muse was kept as busy as the fire brigade.
But it is for his description of a rail crash, The Tay Bridge Disaster, that McGonagall is probably best known. The opening verse gives a flavour of the tragedy:
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 remembered for a very long time.
Oddly enough, the estimate of "ninety lives" seems to be one of his rare concessions to metre, because only 46 bodies were ever recovered and the toll was finally put at 75. Early editions of newspapers tend to overstate disaster tolls. You expect poetry, which is a somewhat slower medium, to be more definitive.
But McGonagall recovers from this lapse by including in the poem what is in effect a safety consultants' report on the disaster:
I must now conclude my lay
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.
McGonagall had such a high opinion of himself that when the then poet laureate Tennyson died in 1892, he sought to replace him. Tactfully, Queen Victoria was not in when he called to press his case.
Unlike others, however, McGonagall did not take this badly. Ten years earlier, another Scottish poet, Roderick Maclean, was sufficiently angered by a polite rebuff that he attempted to assassinate the queen in revenge. She survived, but did not escape the inevitable epic from McGonagall:
God prosper long our
noble Queen,
long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain. . .
Ireland did not avoid his attentions either. One of his own favourite works, which is also one of his more coherent, was The Rattling Boy from Dublin.
It concerns a character called Barney Magee and begins:
I'm a rattling boy from
Dublin Town,
I courted a girl called Biddy Brown,
Her eyes they were as black as sloes,
She had black hair and an aquiline nose.
Unfortunately for Barney, his affair with Biddy ends badly. As, of course, so does the poem.
Changing the subject, but still on boys of Dublin, one question remains about the payments to the Taoiseach controversy. Namely: has the affair left us with any new political acronyms?
Ever since the GUBU years of
the early 1980s, this has been the real test of a crisis
in Irish public life.
There's no doubt that Paddy the Plasterer has achieved immortality. If McGonagall were still alive, he would probably even now be writing a poem about him:
Here's an ode to the mem'ry of Paddy the Plasterer,
Who came to the aid of his political master, or
Friend, or both, as the case
may be
In the year of our Lord, nineteen ninety and three.
But what about acronyms? Sadly, I fear that the spin-doctors are on to this, and are now avoiding soundbites that could become memorable for the wrong reasons. Very few political phrases these days seem to resolve themselves into anything as catchy as GUBU. Promising as they might sound, "whip-around among friends" and "honest error of judgment" have no potential that I can see.
But wait. Hasn't there always been something Homer Simpson-esque about Bertie's self-potrayal as an average Joe. And isn't the Opposition always trying to paint his as the leader of an accident-prone Government? So maybe it wasn't such a good idea for him to keep using that description of the €50,000. You know: "Debt of honour". Or as Homer would say, smacking his forehead: "DOH!"