Earlier in the summer, around the time of that insane visit to the deep ocean in a vessel hulled with cut-price material discarded as unsafe by the aviation industry and with a navigation system controlled by fucking Bluetooth, I saw on Twitter a thread of images. The topicality of the compilation was that it treated of disaster and the deep ocean. (I am currently in one of my strict Twitter bans, otherwise I’d find the thread and link to it.) The images were all from 1912: they were savage contemporary roastings, in newsprint, of all the atrocious poetry which was submitted — some of it published, a great deal more of it refused — in the aftermath of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
The thought of these bad memorials put me in mind, perhaps inevitably, of William McGonagall’s poem ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, and I wrote these paragraphs about it. I refrained from posting them on Substack firstly because I am having an incredibly shy, unwell, private year; and, secondly, because I posted a Substack about McGonagall previously and was anxious that I would somehow be trying your patience by doing so again. It was in 2021, so, that latter anxiety is fairly stupid, I think; certainly more stupid than the former.
Anyway, ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’. Don’t you think, bizarrely, that against the odds, it succeeds? Maybe not as a “good poem”, whatever that is, but as a memorial? If you don’t, probably stop reading now. I love this poem.
Despite the wilful stylistic naivety — this “greatest bad poet ever” absolutely knew what he was doing — there is the narrative sketched of a catastrophe. I think the repetitious mock grandeur of “On the last Sabbath day of 1879 / Which will be remembered for a very long time”, although it’s definitely funny, and a disgraceful parody of a rhyme, is only a failure in the sense that it fails, in its repetition, to survive as comic poetry; it instead comes to feel like a genuinely solemn drone, as the story itself just gets worse and worse. There are other mini-refrains — “railway bridge of the silvery Tay” — which also feel like they were intended as mock grandeur but which, again, I claim have an effect perversely in the poem-as-memorial’s favour.
I’ve always thought that McGonagall deserves more than merely laughter, but — to be clear — I’m not saying this in some irony-poisoned way. Yes, it’s absurd as a piece of writing. But it knows it is. McGonagall craved and enjoyed the precise attention he knew how to get. There is something about the instincts that produced this poem which, however guileful or not they may have been, mean that it is likely to be better, genuinely better poetry, than a lot of the dogshit verse which was sent in after the sinking of the Titanic. McGonagall’s honed craft is the Bad Poem, and, you know, he’s good at it, he’s awesome at it — yet somehow there is an indestructible sincerity at the core of this elegy. Even that preposterously silly ending, invoking the hearsay of “sensible men” with regard to buttresses — as if he’s using pat rhymes to mock the poetical pressure to end with a moral — this is still, in disguise, a point about how stupid and how avoidable were these civilian deaths.
There is something about McGonagall’s use of straightforwardness for comic effect which does not really work in this poem. Often elsewhere he is being bathetic, for fun, by suddenly and deliberately turning away from the poetical and saying something utterly banal: but when, in the face of a disaster like this, he opens the very last stanza of his commemorative poem by saying: “It must have been an awful sight” — do you not just think: yeah, it must have been. Why overcomplicate that?
Sincerely, in terms of a public utterance commemorating actual death and terror and suffering, I’d take ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, read sombrely and without sniggering, any day, over Carol Ann Duffy's poem after the Pulse massacre. I know she was laureate at the time, and I know that Poet Laureate is a context which necessarily forces the extrusion of startlingly bad poetry — but Jesus wept, that Pulse one is a candidate for the worst poems ever published, I think. It’s so asphyxiatingly earnest, and so incomprehensibly stupid.
‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ was used as the text for an orchestral work a few years ago, I can’t remember who by — I heard it on the radio, by chance. The text was set seriously: this was a threnody, for orchestra and choir (or perhaps for solo singer). To me, it would have really, really worked, actually, if they had stopped there; but they didn't, they also had the players at one point drop a ping-pong ball on the floor — one ball for each of the people who died in the disaster. My feeling is that treating McGonagall’s text completely seriously is enough of a gimmick — a good one, but still a gimmick — that introducing another gimmick, and I’m sorry to say not a gimmick I liked, kind of made the whole thing crumble. It felt silly, when its lack of silliness was exactly what was making it interesting. Anyway, as someone who finds composing music to be very difficult, whoever made that piece was a hero — anyone who can finish a score, on any scale, is always a hero to me — so I feel I’ve been a bit mean about the ping-pong ball gesture.
Here’s the whole poem, why not:
THE TAY BRIDGE DISASTER
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.‘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 Edinburgh
The 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.”But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.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.So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o’er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale
How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
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.
So, yes. A definitely silly poem which, I feel, against all odds, does constitute an actual sincere memorial. A failure at being a failure, if you like! And probably better than most of our laurates could have done, almost by default, but also because of its own idiosyncrasies. This encomium is all a little over the top, I know, but I genuinely enjoy how defensive and protective I can get over McGonagall and his work. Mockery is such a dissatisfying activity, even if the work gladly invites it as a first response — so I always press the point that there is plenty more to be done with his poems than merely laugh at them.
I hope you’re all well; thank you for subscribing. This Substack is free, but there’s a paid option which is simply a donation if you have the money to spare — I lost my work (and there wasn’t much of that) when the pandemic hit, and I survive otherwise on disability benefits.
Brief recommendations: some of my favourite writing online is posted on utopian drivel by Huw Lemmey, and on Some Flowers Soon by Jeremy Noel-Tod.
In googling those it occurred to me that googling “horses noise” doesn’t work very well as a way to find this Substack. Should I call it something different? It’d feel weird, after three years of this. But maybe I should. Let me know if you have an idea.