Beautiful town of Montrose, I will now commence my lay,
And I will write in praise of thee without dismay,
And in spite of all your foes,
I will venture to call thee Bonnie Montrose.
Your beautiful Chain Bridge is magnificent to be seen,
Spanning the river Esk, a beautiful tidal stream,
Which abounds with trout and salmon,
Which can be had for the catching without any gammon.
Then as for the Mid Links, it is most beautiful to be seen,
And I’m sure is a very nice bowling green,
Where young men can enjoy themselves and inhale the pure air,
Emanating from the sea and the beautiful flowers there,
And as for the High Street, it’s most beautiful to see,
There’s no street can surpass it in the town of Dundee,
Because it is so long and wide,
That the people can pass on either side
Without jostling one another or going to any bother.
Beautiful town of Montrose, near by the seaside,
With your fine shops and streets so wide,
’Tis health for the people that in you reside,
Because they do inhale the pure fragrant air,
Emanating from the pure salt wave and shrubberies growing there;
And the inhabitants of Montrose ought to feel gay,
Because it is one of the bonniest towns in Scotland at the present day.
Is this poem unique in the great bard’s output?
The middle stanza ends with a line in blank verse, where one might have expected it to rhyme with the two previous ones. The line isn’t even necessary: the previous two lines make a perfectly satisfactory conclusion to the stanza. Perhaps that is the problem: those two lines scan remarkably well by McGonagall’s standards, and the rhyme is unexceptionable. Maybe as great a poet as William Topaz felt they were rather too bland and not fully representative of his mature style.
I refuse to think that the immortal bard would have done anything as amateurish as ending the stanza with a single line containing an internal rhyme. After all “one another” and “bother” are pretty hopeless rhyming partners, even by the standards of our hero.