Half of "Beautiful Rothesay" is a holiday advertisement, and the other half is a love song. The opening stanzas address "holiday makers" directly and tell them to "be advised by me": the scenery cannot be "surpassed in fair Scotland", the air is good for you, and the birds sing on a fine summer day. Then, in the third stanza, the speaker turns to "sweet Jessie" and invites her to "Scotland's garden of Eden". The advert becomes a private outing. The central idea never changes, though. Rothesay is a place where nothing can go wrong, where health, beauty and happiness arrive together and cost nothing.
The form is simple. Every stanza is made of rhyming couplets (grand/Scotland, there/air, day/gay, me/Sea), and nearly every line stops dead at its end, so the poem advances in small, tidy steps. The line lengths are another matter. The long lines, such as "For the benefit of their health, by inhaling the pure air", carry far more syllables than the ear can sort into a steady beat, and reading them aloud feels like walking with an uneven stride. The third stanza is the exception. Its short lines ("Then sweet Jessie, let us go, / To Scotland's garden of Eden O!") bounce along like a folk-song chorus, and the tacked-on "O!" is there plainly to hold up the rhyme. It is the only moment when the rhythm sounds as if it knows where it is going.
The vocabulary is where the poem shows its character. "Beautiful" appears six times in the body of the poem, plus once in the title, attached to Rothesay, the village, the mansions, the walks and the scenery. "Gay" (in its older sense of merry) turns up three times, always at the end of a line where it can rhyme with "day". The poem keeps telling us the place is lovely and almost never shows us why. The concrete details are few: ships passing "to and fro", mansions, "trees, and shrubberies, green", birds. Even these are described by what they do for us, since the ships "drive away dull care, and woe". The speaker is so eager to persuade that he skips the work of picturing. A reader who has never seen Rothesay finishes the poem knowing that it is approved of, but not what it looks like.
One idea does recur with real persistence, and that is air. The first stanza recommends "inhaling the pure air", and the fourth ends with "to inhale the balmy air". Between them comes the poem's one odd phrase, "the heavens breath smells wooingly there", which mixes smell and courtship in a way that is accidentally striking. Together with "healthy" and "the benefit of their health", this makes the seaside sound like a cure as well as a treat. The "garden of Eden" fits this, because the Eden the poem describes has no serpent and no fall. The only shadow is that the couple "grow weary", and even that is smoothed over at once: they go home "with our spirits light and gay".
What makes the poem worth studying is how plainly it shows the machinery of verse. McGonagall's name is now often used as shorthand for unintentionally comic poetry, and this poem shows why. The rhymes are chosen for convenience, the commas fall in odd places ("holiday makers, to go there,"), and praise is repeated where detail is needed. But the voice is entirely sincere. There is no irony and no hedging, and its one touch of Scots, "fu' cheerie", gives the closing walk a friendly local warmth. Reading it alongside a poem that makes a place vivid, a student can see exactly what is missing here: specific images, control of rhythm, and rhyme that serves the meaning instead of leading it. The poem's enthusiasm is real, even if its craft is not, and that mismatch is both what makes it funny and what makes it useful to study.