Few poems about a park spend so long on tombstones, policemen and the weather. McGonagall's account of the opening of the Hill o' Balgay is meant as a celebration, but it reads less like a lyric about nature than a report from the local paper, set to rhyme. Here is what you can see, here is who turned up, here is what they said, and here is how everyone went home.
The poem falls into two halves. The first is an advertisement. The hill is "health for the old and young," a place to "breathe the fragrant air," and the speaker leads us round like a tour guide: Harry Scott's mansion, the Law Hill, Magdalen Green, the "silvery Tay," the coast of Fife, St. Andrews. The second half turns to narrative. On "the opening day" the bands and banners gather in Dundee, march out the Blackness Road, listen to two speeches and disperse. Both halves share one purpose, which is to tell the reader that this is something to be proud of.
The vocabulary of praise is strikingly narrow. "Beautiful" appears again and again, attached to the hill, the flowers, the town, the sight of the procession. It works less as description than as a stamp of approval. The one image that actually moves is the Tay "Rolling on its way," which is also one of the shortest lines in the poem. Even there, "silvery" is a stock epithet rather than a fresh observation. (The "green frees" of the opening line, in the text as printed here, look like a slip for "trees.")
The form is as loose as the language. There are no stanzas, only one unbroken block, and the line lengths swing wildly, from four words ("Rolling on its way") to long, galloping lines like "Numerous bands, with flags and banners, assembled in Dundee." The rhymes are scattered rather than patterned, and they are driven by the place name. "Day," "way," "away" and "Balgay" return again and again, as though the poet keeps steering back to the one sound he knows will rhyme. Sometimes the grammar bends to fit, as in "made a fine speech in his turn," which exists to set up "mourn." The long lines do have one advantage: their steady, tramping beat suits a procession.
The most revealing details are the ones the poet clearly thinks are selling points. Visitors may "through the burying-ground roam, / And read the epitaphs on the tombstones / Before they go home," as though a graveyard stroll were a cheerful finish to a healthy outing. Lovers can walk "safe arm in arm" because policemen "watch there all day" to protect them from harm. A few lines later, the view from the top includes St. Andrews, "Where Cardinal Beaten lost his life," dropped in as casually as any other landmark. The poem never notices the shift in tone, and that blindness is a large part of its charm.
The climax is the Earl of Dalhousie's speech. The one thing that makes him "mourn" is that there is "no profection from the rain," so he offers "another five hundred pounds" for a shed. The crowd responds with "three loud cheers," and their hearts "opened, and flowed with joyous tears." The emotional peak of the poem is a rain shelter. The final line is flat, almost like minutes from a meeting: "And that ended the inauguration of the Hill o' Balgay." The grand word "inauguration" sits oddly beside such a modest ending.
Judging by the poem itself, its social picture is a deferential one. The named men, the Earl and the young laird, make the speeches, and the anonymous crowd applauds and weeps with gratitude. Generosity flows down, and thanks flow up. Whether or not the poet meant it as a comment, the poem records a world in which a donor's gift was the main event.
That is where its interest lies. Read now, it is hard not to smile at the bathos, but the poem is also a sincere snapshot of civic pride, with its route, its sums of money and its list of local landmarks. It shows what its writer seems to have believed poetry was for: recording a public occasion, praising the people responsible and sending the reader home satisfied. The gap between that earnestness and the effect it produces is exactly what keeps the poem memorable.