"Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou seemest most charming to my sight;
As I gaze upon thee in the sky so high,
A tear of joy does moisten mine eye."
-William McGonagall
William McGonagall has long been considered to be the 'world's worst poet' to date. A title which most of us work our entire literary careers hoping to avoid, McGonagall was either blithely clueless, a man worthy of our every admiration if only for the sheer tenacity of his vision or having a clever laugh on everyone to the extent that here we are discussing it a hundred years after the fact. Perhaps he was a bit of each.
McGonagall was something of a late bloomer, embarking upon his (what is the opposite word of 'prestigious'?) career at the seasoned age of 47, abandoning his trade as a handmill worker for the sudden call of a discordant, if not execrable, muse. He was only ever paid once for his work, a paean to Sunlight Soap,
"You can use it with great pleasure and ease
Without wasting any elbow grease:
And when washing the most dirty clothes
The sweat won't be dripping from your nose."
It was not just that McGonagall was bad - it was that he was so richly, gloriously and deliciously bad. He reveled, he crowed, he basked. Crowds thronged to jeer him on with baskets of rotten fruit. He remained undaunted and further convinced of his literary greatness and their jealousy. Several conspired to play a practical joke upon him by sending him a 'royal document' allegedly from the King of Burmah which conferred upon him the dubious title of "Grand Knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant". Rather than cutting his illustrious career short due to such seeming and never-ending ridicule, it only served further to spur him on. He accepted the title with great zeal and aplomb, and used it until the end of his days. The man was dauntless,
Stephen Pile considers him so 'giftedly bad that he backed straight into unwitting genius".
How can you not adore him? At an age where most people are withering in spirit, mourning the demise of youth, McGonagall rather embarks upon the most successful career change of his age, being great and being bad. He became legend. And in the throes of rotten fruits and spoiled eggs, does he once flinch? Never! In fact, he pronounces it all a great victory and further ascends the ranks. It is never that he is dismayed at all by his seeming failures, in fact, he never sees them as failures at all.
So, was he deluded or enlightened or simply smarter than the rest?
There is a clever sort of parody popular today on the internet you may be familiar with, where websites are deliberately designed to trick the public into thinking that they are real just to ruffle feathers - Manbeef.com and Poetic Gems
by William Topaz McGonagall
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