The Great Scot in Central Park

William McGonagall (1825-1902) was a god-awful poet. Critics assailed him with savage reviews and audiences assailed him with rotten vegetables. What endears him to me is his absolute certainty that he was meant to be a poet and his dogged pursuit of recognition. What’s more, as someone who has received his share of rejections, I admire that, for better or worse, he was immune to discouragement and showed insuppressible resilience. In 1878, after his letter requesting royal patronage was rebuffed with a perfunctory “thank you for your interest,” he was so certain the response had been favorable that he hiked sixty miles from Dundee, Scotland, to Balmoral Castle, over mountains and through a thunderstorm, to give a reading as the “Queen’s Poet” for Queen Victoria. Turned away at the door, he walked home and kept on writing. Since, it would seem, any royalty would do, he took an honorific from a letter in which the “King of Burmah” dubbed him “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah.” Though the letter was obviously specious, McGonagall used the title for the rest of his career. Poverty, desire for royal approbation and ridicule sum up his life.

Broke in 1887, he sailed to New York City to seek his fortunes. Hence came his enthusiastic “Jottings of New York: A Descriptive Poem,” seventeen lines of which describe Central Park. Let's start with writers and zoo-animals:

. . . And as for Central Park, it is lovely to be seen,

Especially in the summer season when its shrubberies and trees are green;

And the Burns’ statue is there to be seen,

Surrounded by trees, on the beautiful sward so green;

Also Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott,

Which by Englishmen and Scotchmen will ne’er be forgot.

There the people on the Sabbath-day in thousands resort,

All loud, in conversation and searching for sport,

Some of them viewing the menagerie of wild beasts there,   

And also beautiful black swans, I do declare.

Say what you will about McGonagall’s poetry, the guy wrote what he saw. Rather than present a stop-by-stop account of his visit, however, he groups the material according to theme and its importance to him. The first stanza describes the Literary Walk at the south end of the Mall. A proud Scotsman, he gives us the Scottish Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, with Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. The fourth writer in the Literary Walk, the American Fitz-Greene Halleck, is utterly neglected, as if unworthy of mention. The second stanza focuses on Sunday visitors to the park arriving “in thousands,” which, 19th century sources suggest, is an accurate rather than hyperbolic estimation. He likely is watching them enter through the Children’s Gate (5th Avenue and 64th Street) because he goes on to mention the “menagerie” which at the time was housed behind the Arsenal, at the site of the present Zoo. The New York Public Library preserves an undated stereograph of two black swans which very well may be the pair that McGonagall immortalizes in his poem.

And there’s beautiful boats to be seen there,

And the joyous shouts of the children do rend the air,

While the boats sail along with them o’er Lohengrin Lake,   

And the fare is five cents for children and adults ten is all they take.

And there’s also summer-house shades and merry-go-rounds,

And with the merry laughter of the children the Park resounds

During the livelong Sabbath day,

Enjoying the merry-go-round play. . .

The third stanza exalts the Lake, the first of the Park’s features to be made open to the public (1858). Boating became available on it in the 1860’s, and McGonagall preserves not just the excited shouts there but, in a bathetic lapse, the exact cost of boat rental for children and adults, as if he were writing promotional copy. The bathos is all the more striking in that, in the preceding line, he, with the lofty literary allusion “Lohengrin Lake,” compares the rowboats with the children in them to the swan-drawn boat of Lohengrin, “the Knight of the Swan,” a German Arthurian hero who sails across a lake to rescue Elsa Duchess of Brabant.

In the final stanza, he refers to the first iteration of the Carousel, which operated from 1871-1924. To make it go round, a blind mule and a horse in an underground trench would trudge in a circle, starting and stopping in obedience to a tap of the operator’s foot. In his poem "Central Park," Billy Collins moves in his mind from the current Carousel to the one McGonagall encountered:

As the carousel turned in the background,

all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses

rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope,

I was learning how the huge thing

was first designed to be powered

by a blind mule, as it turned out,

strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen

room directly below the merry turning of the carousel.

What McGonagall lacks as a poet he makes up for as an enthusiast for all he sees and as a historical source. I can’t help but love him. Thank goodness that, after his visit to the New World, he at last found steady work: he recited his poetry at a circus in Scotland. For fifteen shillings per night, he would face a constant barrage of eggs, herrings and stale bread from the audience. Who says you can’t make a living as a poet?