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Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah

Temperance Gems (by McGonagall, William Topaz)
Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay, The (by McGonagall, William Topaz)
Rhymes of a Doggerel Bard : as They Appe... (by Edgar, William C. (William Crowell), 1856-1932)
Scripscrapologia : Or, Collins's Doggere... (by John Collins)

Doggerel is generally categorized as poetry with inconsistent or irregular meter, rife with clichés, and inadvertently funny. Or you can just call it bad poetry.

It’s neither nonsense poetry nor limericks. The main distinction is that no one often tries to write doggerel poetry. They only truly achieve its glory by first intending to write with quality, only to fail miserably.

But in spinning around the postmodernist wheel of aesthetics—which is to say, nothing is new under the sun—many of us currently find our taste to be in bad taste. Sick of the perfect, weary of the well-crafted and high-brow, tired of strictness and auteurs and opuses, many have instead found enjoyable refuge in what terrible poetry has come down to us through the years. Even better yet to have a similar story of man or woman attached to it. Such is the case with the self-dubbed Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah William McGonagall.

McGonagall is in many ways the champion of doggerel, not in its inception, but in his repeated recognition many times around as the worst poet in the English language. In order to be the father of anything, let alone to earn notoriety for being terrible, you can’t just be adequately terrible, you must be exceptionally terrible, exceedingly bad. The last stanza of one of his best worst poems titled "The Tay Bridge Disaster" reads:

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.

Writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell once mercifully called McGonagall’s poetry the “poetry of information.” "The Tay Bridge Disaster" certainly gives information on the event, but not very much. Every stanza seems to give just about the same information as the last, only in a slightly different way, and it reads like a memorization exercise for a fourth grade student. If it were instead targeted as children’s poetry, it might not be considered doggerel, but historical. But it wasn’t. This poem, along with a handful of other equally brilliant poems, were collected in McGonagall’s opus, Poetic Gems.

Certain stories of his personhood solidified McGonagall’s legacy. The most important fact to his legacy is that he always intended to write good poetry, which made his failing more hilarious, if not also tragic. His stories reflected a certain admirable earnestness, like the time he travelled 50 miles on foot to see Queen Victoria, only to be rejected at the gates. Or the time he, as a Shakespearean actor, refused to die on stage playing Macbeth.

McGonagall died a pauper in 1902.

For some McGonagall books transcribed into audio, check out Temperance Gems and Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay. For more doggerel poetry, check out Rhymes of a Doggerel Bard by William Crowell and Scripscrapologia: Or Collin’s Doggerel Dish of All Sorts by John Collins.

By Thad Higa