Anyone expecting a monster will be disappointed: McGonagall's "Loch Ness" never mentions one. What it offers instead is a tourist's rapture. The poem follows a traveller along the water, past hills, woods, deer and the Falls of Foyers, until he is so overwhelmed that he can only exclaim, then sigh, then say goodbye. Its central idea is simple: some places are so beautiful they leave a visitor dizzy with delight and reluctant to leave. McGonagall's name has become shorthand for unintentionally comic verse, and this poem shows why it makes such a good case study. The feeling is sincere, but the language keeps getting in its way.
The clearest clue to how the poem is built is its rhyme. The lines have no regular length or pattern. Rhyme arrives wherever it can, and meaning seems to follow along behind. Take the run "romantic... gigantic... frantic". The first two fit a mountain landscape, but "Enough to make one frantic" suggests panic rather than admiration, and it looks as though the rhyme supplied the word before the sense did. The same thing happens at the climax, where the traveller declares the loch "the most beautiful to behold" and the line completes itself with "water so cold". It is an oddly chilly ending to a burst of praise, and a rhyme with "behold" is the likeliest reason for it. Even the opening, "The truth to express", works as padding to reach the rhyme with "Ness".
The rhythm is just as unsteady. Short lines such as "As clear as the day, / Enchanting and gay" bounce along like a nursery rhyme, while others, like "That he exclaims in an ecstasy of delight -", sprawl and run out of breath. There is a long chain of "-ay" rhymes (gay, way, day, play, spray), which gives the middle of the poem a chanting momentum. That cheerful drumbeat carries you forward even while the ideas barely move.
The imagery and key words show the same pattern. "Beautiful" appears seven times, and "green", "clear" and "crystal" are used again and again. The scenery is all stock items: heathery hills, rills, woodlands, "the deer and the doe". They could belong to almost any Highland view. The poem works hardest on the waterfall. Water "falling from such a height / That his heed feels giddy" is the one moment where we feel a body reacting to a place, and the "spray" gives a brief flash of an actual picture. The old-fashioned "thy" and "doth" sit beside plain "you" and "your", as if the poet is reaching for dignity and not quite settling on a voice.
The point of view also shifts as the poem goes on. It begins by addressing the loch directly, then moves to a general "one" and a third-person "traveller". Finally it lets that traveller speak in his own exclamations. The poet slips behind the visitor, much as a guidebook does, and the reader is invited to stand in the visitor's shoes. The ending, "I must bid you good-bye", is the most natural moment in the poem. A sigh and a farewell are exactly what a reluctant tourist would give.
What makes the poem worth studying is how clearly it shows the difference between announcing a feeling and creating it. We are told the traveller is "amazed with delight" and in "an ecstasy", yet we are given very little that would make us feel it ourselves. Ask what one detail here could only come from someone who had stood beside this water, and the answer is hard to find, apart from the giddy drop of the falls. That is a useful test to apply to any descriptive writing. The poem's other lasting quality is its openness. There is no irony and no guardedness, only a writer determined to say "beautiful" as many times as it takes. Whether that charms or amuses you, it makes the poem easy to remember, and a reminder that good description depends on what is noticed as much as on how warmly it is praised.