Greenland's Icy Mountains

[edited re-upload]

Here is something I like. I am nominating myself to write something a little silly about it, because it is itself a little silly.

It is ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’, by William McGonagall.

Here are the first four stanzas:

Greenland’s icy mountains are fascinating and grand,
And wondrously created by the Almighty’s command;
And the works of the Almighty there’s few can understand:
Who knows but it might be a part of Fairyland?

Because there are churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass,
And for scenic grandeur there’s nothing can it surpass,
Besides there’s monuments and spires, also ruins,
Which serve for a safe retreat from the wild bruins.

And there’s icy crags and precipices, also beautiful waterfalls,
And as the stranger gazes thereon, his heart it appals
With a mixture of wonder, fear, and delight,
Till at last he exclaims, Oh! what a wonderful sight!

The icy mountains they’re higher than a brig’s topmast,
And the stranger in amazement stands aghast
As he beholds the water flowing off the melted ice
Adown the mountain sides, that he cries out, Oh! how nice!

I love the energy here, in the third and fourth: how each ends with a slightly absurd exclamation, a moment of overwhelmed inarticulacy on the part of ‘the stranger’, who has both times appeared at the start of line 2, scaled three long lines, and barely even caught their breath before remarking preposterously on the view. The turn from line 2 into line 3 is unbroken by any punctuation (in stanza 3), and in stanza 4 that stretch is even longer, literally not a pause between the stranger appearing and his exclaiming.

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In Walt Whitman — with whom McGonagall is roughly contemporary — there is often to be found a dazzling sense of forward propulsion via the use of anaphora, that cumulative accumulation of energy derived from each line beginning with the same word or gesture. McGonagall, on the other hand, wrenches his verse into carrying itself away by what happens at the end of the lines.

Surely I just mean, his poems rhyme? Well, yes: but McGonagall’s is a usage of rhyme which somehow spills over from being this familiar literary technique, in all its guises, and becomes a kind of duress, or even a pathology: it is the primary, superordinating, absolute condition of his verse, almost the only condition, in that it comes at the expense of almost any other aspect of poetry that you care to mention — such that to set a syllable at the end of a line is less like a preparation for decoration, for constraint, for subtlety, for nuance, and more like, I don’t know — pulling a pin out of a hand-grenade? — or maybe like the crossing of an event horizon. There is absolutely no way that a line-end sound, once heard, won’t be heard again: no matter what it takes. And the rhyme — I think it’s still fair to call it a rhyme — is never far off: he may group them into regular stanzas, he may group them into irregular stanzas, or have no blank lines at all, but McGonagall writes relentlessly in rhyming couplets.

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The fact that the particular propulsive device of Whitman’s comes at the start of the line means that the line which follows may billow out in length, crossing and re-crossing the right margin, with a magnificent pioneering energy, even erotic when he wants it to be; and the poem emphatically rhapsodizes onward. McGonagall’s end-rhymes certainly cause metrical and syntactic elongations, too, but always within a line whose end is already in definite sight (or, hearing). So that rather than unimpeded forward motion, they force the line to take an exaggeratedly torqued detour to their destination. There is an absolutely heroic disregard for scansion, and a surely-knowing propensity for awkward filler. To pull in a simile from nowhere: just as a golf course is an outrageous image of Scotland, so McGonagall’s verse is an outrageous image of poetry; and his relentless couplets buckle the lines into a blustery jostling of bunkers and bushes and lakes and whatever other obstacles you want to imagine.

In fact, rather than a golf ball, a bit of wood — I would affectionately characterize McGonagall’s rhyme-energy one more way: when ‘the poet and tragedian of Dundee’ ends a line, the requirement for a rhyme is flung into the air like a lavish stick thrown for an enthusiastic beagle. Fetch! Sometimes it flies just a few feet forward; so he can, he realizes, retrieve it in an almost bathetic instant:

While the whales keep lashing the water all their might
With their mighty tails, left and right.

— or, contrarily, perhaps he has to dart about through bushes and even across rivers, though still at last picking it up triumphantly —

Especially while seated around the fireside on a cold winter night,
Let them think of the cold and hardships Greenland sailors have to fight.

Isn’t that an elegant way to end a poem? Maybe our beagle darts through a similarly difficult landscape, only to find, well, a very similar stick:

And new peaks and cliffs rise up out of the sea,
While great cataracts of uplifted brine pour down furiously.

Or, as here, in the final couplet of a significantly less interesting poem — sometimes this beagle clatters noisily through through several people’s back gardens before gnawing on something which is, and this cannot be taken away from him, a stick:

Because, for the loss of Captain Ward, the men felt woebegone,
Because in bravery, they said, he was next to Admiral Nelson.

Enough of that. Although I did warn you this was silly.

When a composer sets a text by someone considered a bad poet, and sets it in deadly earnest, it’s often packaged in terms of there being an automatic irony there. Un-ironically, I like ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’. This isn’t the case, I admit it, with very much McGonagall at all; but I think it is enjoyable with this poem to try to read it as if the line ‘for scenic grandeur there’s nothing can it surpass’ is as true of the poem as it is of the landscape it describes. It’s a strange little thing, and I feel weirdly defensive of it. In its way, it is beautiful.

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P.S.

These excerpts I typed up from Poetic Gems, by William McGonagall. My copy has ‘K. Jones’ hand-written on the inside — my piano teacher lent me it when I was fifteen. ‘And I want that back,’ he said — ‘it's the kind of book you lend someone and never see again.’

(... sorry, Keith!)