The double dactyl (or higgledy-piggledy) is a poem form that involves two quatrains where
the first three lines of each quatrain are dactyllic bimeter and the last line of each is a dactyl with a single accented syllable at the end. For those of you who don't know what the hell those all are, I'll explain.
A dactyl is a meter that goes like this: DA-da-da. So your poem would sound like this, roughly:
DA-da-da DA-da-da
DA-da-da DA-da-da
DA-da-da DA-da-da
DA-da-da-DA
(repeated once)
There are other rules to this form. The fourth and eighth lines have to rhyme, the first line is a nonsense phrase that rhymes with the second line, the second line has to be a proper noun, and the sixth line has to be one word. Got all that? Okay. The best way to explain it is to show an example:
Helliot Smelliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot
says that the 20th
century sucks.
Miniver Cheevy's frayed
psychopathology
cloaked in propriety's
top hat and tux.
(anonymous)
Here's another anonymous one:
Hestimus-festimus
Felix Domesticus
Regal as princes and
lazy as bums.
Partial to canned food and
ultra-magnamimous
folks who have got those op-
posable thumbs.
After all that, here's my own double dactyl / higgledy-piggledy poem.
"For all jewels in the world, Happy is still dead"
Wiggedy-waggedy
"Fishpunk the Tragedy"
once was a play that I
wrote for my dog
I said, "My dear, it is
extramagnificent."
She just said nothing and
slept like a log.
That's all. Just so you know, I got all this info from Steve Kowit's book In the Palm of Your Hand which is sort of a guide for aspiring poets.
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