The Gallery of Errors · Specimen 902
The Tay Bridge Disaster
Thesis of failureEvery device of elegy is present and every one misfires: the apostrophe salutes the wrong party, the filler queue-jumps the dead, and the largest fact in the poem lands on the flattest phrase available.
Device index
Hover a card to trace its span in the passage; click to pin its dossier card.
Tropes
Direct address to an absent or non-human entity.
A collapse from the momentous to the trivial.
A descriptive tag fixed to a name.
Schemes
Words surplus to the sense.
Syntax
Word order and word choice dictated by the rhyme scheme rather than the sense.
Full dossier
1The Autopsy
Sincerity is not a defence. McGonagall means every word, and that is precisely the difficulty: unearned devices are worse when meant. The order of address — bridge first, self second, victims third — is the poem's true moral structure, arrived at by accident. The final line shows the rule of scale: a fact is weighed against the phrase spent on it, and "a very long time" cannot lift ninety lives.
2The Repair
Remove the address to the bridge, the apology for speaking, and the measurement of memory: "On the last Sabbath day of 1879, the Tay Bridge fell, and ninety lives went down with it." One sentence. The bridge is now the subject of a verb of failure, not a dedication — which is where it belonged.