Few poems state their business as bluntly as this one. It opens by addressing the river, "Beautiful silvery Tay", and spends the rest of its length finding new ways to say the same thing. The Tay's scenery, the speaker insists, runs all the way to Perth and is finer than any other river's, and a summer's day beside it is enough to make anyone "feel light and gay". There is no story and no argument, only one feeling repeated until it fills the page.
The way the poem is built explains much of its character. The lines have no steady metre. They swing from the five syllables of "Beautiful silvery Tay" to the sprawling "Where the Railway Bridge is towering above its waters sublime", and a reader has to decide for themselves where the beats fall. Rhyme is what holds it together, and it dominates. "Tay", "gay", "way", "day" and "Bay" chime again and again, and the sense often seems to scramble after the sound. "Thy scenery around is charming I'll be bound" has little purpose beyond landing on a rhyme. "As clear as the day" is a comparison that explains nothing, yet it sounds right beside "Tay". At one point the poem even rhymes a word with itself: "fine", "Rhine", "fine" in three consecutive lines.
That Rhine moment is one of the most revealing in the poem. The speaker claims "No other river in the world has got scenery more fine", then immediately admits, "Only I am told the beautiful Rhine". The grand boast is undercut by hearsay, and the poem never notices. Its confidence and its honesty are working against each other, and the result is oddly endearing.
Word choice shows the same habit of repeating whatever has worked. "Gay" appears several times, in the older sense of bright and cheerful: the landscapes are "lovely and gay", the ship is "lively and gay", even "nature's face seems gay". "Beautiful" is almost a refrain. "Carelessly" turns up twice, first for a ship that "does carelessly lie" in the bay, then for lambs that "carelessly do stray". The same word is stretched across a vessel and a flock, as if the poet trusted it to carry a mood of easy, unhurried peace rather than a precise meaning. The ship is called Mars, and her "Juvenile Tare" is presumably a young sailor, since "tar" was old slang for one. The spelling is another small sign of the poem bending toward its sound.
The imagery is the stock imagery of the pastoral postcard: trees "in full bloom", cornfields like gold, "lambkins" at play, a "humming bee" on the wing. None of it is surprising, but the place-names ground it. Wormit Bay, Balnerino, Newport and Perth turn the poem into a kind of guided walk down the river, with the speaker pointing out each view in turn. The Railway Bridge and the moored ship add human structures to the natural scene, and "sublime" is a very large word to apply to the water beneath them. The poem also quietly addresses the river itself, slipping between "your" and "thy", so that the Tay becomes a person to be flattered as well as a place to be described. The line "It is enough to make one sing" works almost as the poem's own explanation: this is what singing about the Tay sounds like to the person doing it.
The ending is circular. After a long closing line it comes back to "the banks of the silvery Tay", the words it began with. Nothing has developed, but nothing was meant to.
The poem matters largely because of the reputation of its author, who is widely remembered as one of the most famously bad poets in English. Readers return to his work for the gap between what it attempts and what it manages. Yet this poem is not merely a joke. Its delight in the river is plainly meant, and that sincerity gives it a strange charm that more skilful poems often lack. It is also a useful lesson in craft. By showing what happens when rhyme leads and meaning follows, it makes clear how much good poets do to make sound and sense seem to arrive together.