Praise can be completely sincere and still go comically wrong, and McGonagall's poem on the Burns statue shows how. The speaker is bursting with admiration. He tells the people of Dundee that the statue is magnificent, that it will last, that strangers will come to stare at it, and that even kings and queens would envy it. Yet by the final line we have learned almost nothing about what the statue looks like. We are never told whether Burns stands or sits, whether he holds a pen or looks at the sky. The poem's central idea is simply that this monument is a wonderful thing and the city is lucky to have it. The poem asserts that idea over and over instead of proving it.
The vocabulary shows this most clearly. Words from the same small family of approval keep returning: "magnificent," "beautifully," "elegant," and "beautiful" twice more. They are big, generous words, but they are also blank ones, because they could be stuck on any statue in any city. The only concrete detail is the sculptor's name, Sir John Steell, and even he arrives mainly as a rhyme for "feel." The poem is also oddly shy about Burns himself. He appears only at the end of the second stanza, addressed as "thee, Immortal Bard of Ayr," and nothing is said about his poems. The praise goes to the bronze, not the man.
The form is tidy even when the language is not. The first two stanzas are rhymed couplets, and the third runs one rhyme sound through all four lines: "eye," "sigh," "by," "die." The lines are long and loose, stretching well past the length of a regular ballad line, and the stresses fall wherever the sentence happens to put them. You can hear the speaker working toward each rhyme word. "Dundee" is dragged in to answer "see." "Ayr" has to follow "stare." Even "design" and "time" are not a true rhyme, only a near one. The repeated "And I hope" at the start of lines (four times in six lines) gives the poem a rhythm of its own. It sounds like a speech to a crowd, with the speaker adding one good wish after another.
Some of those wishes are strange. "And I hope the pangs of hunger he will never feel" is a startling thing to say to a sculptor, and it sits awkwardly beside the talk of magnificence. It is hard not to suspect that the rhyme produced the thought. Still, the line suggests a speaker who imagines artists as people who might go without. "Defy all weathers" is a livelier phrase, turning the statue into a stubborn figure standing up to the sky. And "stare" is a blunter verb than "gaze" or "marvel," which gives the admiring strangers a faintly comic, open-mouthed look.
The last stanza is the boldest. The speaker turns to his "Fellow-citizens," a phrase that makes the poem feel like a public address, and claims the statue is so fine that kings and queens would "sigh" and "feel envious" on passing it. Then comes the leap of logic that makes the stanza memorable. Their envy would come "in fear of not getting such a beautiful Statue after they die." The idea underneath is rather interesting. Monarchs have power but may not be remembered so lovingly, while a poet from Ayr is, in the speaker's eyes, immortal. The poem seems to suggest that the people's favourite can outshine the crowned heads. The way it says so, with kings anxiously worrying about their funeral monuments, tips the thought into unintentional comedy.
That mix of seriousness and absurdity is why the poem is worth reading. McGonagall's name has become a byword for earnest verse that does not quite work, and this poem has the familiar signs: a strained rhyme, filler words like "I must confess," and a grand claim stated more than demonstrated. But it also shows something real. The speaker believes that a poet deserves a public monument and that ordinary citizens should be proud of it, and he wants to join in the celebration with a poem of his own. For students, it is also a useful lesson in the power of detail. Had he given us one image of the statue, such as the shape of a hand or the angle of a head, the praise might have stood up. As it is, the poem leaves us with a voice rather than a picture, and a very distinctive voice it is.