« Which one are you? | Main | Americans and "American English" »
July 07, 2003
The Joy of the Double-Dactyl ...
Brilliant examples of that odd and syncopated verse form, the double dactyl.
Oh what a narcissist!
Beauregard Vanity's
egocentricity's
dauntingly grim.
Could he breed simply by
parthenogenesis,
soon all the world would be
swarming with him!
Do you get the picture? No?
Here's an "explanation".
Double-Dactyl
Long-short-short, long-short-short
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):
One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don't have the time.
Double dactyls were invented by Antony Hecht and Paul Pascal.
A dactyl, as you may know, is a poetic foot of the form >-- (ON-off-off). For example, interstate, realize, microphone, cereal, limerick, etc. etc. A double dactyl, naturally enough, is two dactyls in a row.
A double dactyl is also a poem... Quite like a limerick, it has a rigid (if peculiar) structure. Two stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylic dimeter followed by a line with a dactyl and a single accent. The two stanzas have to rhyme on their last line. The first line of the first stanza is repetitive nonsense. The second line of the first stanza is somebody's name -- strictly speaking, a proper noun. Note that this name must itself be double-dactylic. E.g. Gloria Vanderbilt, Jesus of Nazareth, Gilbert and Sullivan, Archangel Gabriel. In the second stanza, one entire line must be a double-dactylic word. E.g. biopsychology, geopolitical, gastrointestinal, abecedarian, etc. etc.
Finally, here's a bad example (in that the second line is not double dactylic and that the rhyme is weak and etc etc ...) by an anonymous poet ... maybe a new form - the terrordactyl?
Faraway faraway
Open University
Gives me the chance
to get my degree
Science and maths are
unhypothetically
fun things to study - or
don't you agree?
Argh.
Posted by daen at July 7, 2003 10:41 PM