Sunday/McGonagall

William McGonagall was a  poet of Dundee. A very bad one.

He  was a weaver who, in middle age, was visited by The Muse and for 25 years had what King calls a " carnival popularity, guiding him through ridicule -- forged invitations lured him to non-existent public readings, rotten vegetables greeted him at real ones." McGonagall's contemporaries report that they could find no irony in him, or any awareness of what was going on. Today, he is recognized as favorite son and official "Best Bad Poet" of Dundee.

Chambers Biographical Dictionary refers to his "calypsolike disregard for metre"; the editor of The Joy of Bad Verse likens the feeling of reading a McGonagall poem to "that of being driven unsteadily down a meandering road in a rattling old banger, which finally turns abruptly into a brick wall."

Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers held a Worse-Than-McGonagall contest they were unable to find a winner. They made the movie called The Great McGonagall

Some examples of his work:

  On the lesson provided by the collapse of the Tay Railway Bridge:

...Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without 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.

 On the funeral of the German Emperor, an occasion when the city fathers

...in honour of the Emporer considered it no sin
To decorate with crape the beautiful City of Berlin;
Therefore Berlin I declare was a City of crape,
Because few buildings crape decoration did escape.