The Professor Puzzler blog has been pretty quiet recently, so I'm breaking the monotony by asking myself a question.

Me: Professor Puzzler, what is a Double-Dactyl poem, and how do you write one?

Other Me: That's a great question! I hesitate to say that the Double-Dactyl is one of the silliest poetry forms in existence, but…well…it’s one of the silliest poetry forms in existence.

Let’s start with a Double-Dactyl example, and then we can dissect it to understand how the form works. This is a poem about Noah (yes, the guy with the ark).

Splishity splashity
Noah the Patriarch
Built a big boat out of
Gopher-wood trees

Finding some grace in the
Eyes of Jehovah, this
Antediluvian
Sailed o'er the seas

Before we get into the rules, what is a dactyl? A dactyl is a metrical foot which consists of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. In other words, it sounds a bit like a waltz. OOOM-pah-pah OOOM-pah-pah. Okay, now let’s dive in.

1. There are two sets of four lines. These sets of four lines are called “quatrains.”
2. In each quatrain, the first three lines are each two dactyls. The last line of each quatrain is a single dactyl followed by one accented syllable (OOOM-pah-pah-OOOM)
3. The only rhymes we need are at the end of the two quatrains.
4. The first line must be nonsense words. Since they’re nonsense, they don’t have to have anything to do with the subject of the poem, but it can be fun – as I did in my Noah poem – to make them similar to real words that connect to the subject of the poem.
5. The second line must be a proper noun. This would most commonly be a person’s name (or name and title), but could also be a place, organization name, or even something like “U.S.S. Nautilus.” In the example above, NO-ah the PA-tri-arch has the accents on NO and PA, with the other syllables unaccented.
6. Somewhere in the poem – preferably in the second quatrain, and usually the sixth line of the poem (but the location is not a hard-and-fast rule), there must be a line that consists of a single six-syllable word that fits the dactyl rhythm. In the Noah poem, that word is “antediluvian” (which means “before the flood”).

There you have it – now you’re ready to write your own Double-Dactyl. On my YouTube channel (link: Doug's ventiloquism, music, and teaching) my puppets (yes, I’m a ventriloquist!) and I will posted a series of three Double-Dactyls. The third in the series is actually sung instead of recited; if you learn the tune, that may help you write your own Double-Dactyls!

Wiffity Woffity (a poem about a timberwolf and a dodo bird)

Axity Waxity (a poem about George Washington and a cherry tree)

Offity Scoffity (a poem about Alice in Wonderland)

Note that in my poems, my nonsense words all end in “-ity” but that is not a requirement; I just like the way it sounds. I guess I just got stuck in a nonsense rut.

Finally, if you’re interested in other kinds of poetry, one of my puppets shares his own rendition of Robert Burns’ “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose,” and several of my puppets have done limericks: Jeorge’s Limerick, Jeffrey’s Limerick, Professor Jameson’s Limerick, Doctor Jonas’ Limerick.

And for those who like Star Wars, be on the lookout for some Star Wars themed Double Dactyls late in 203!

Rosanna from Italy writes, "I'm an Italian student of English, dealing with learning literature. Introducing the Medieval ballad, after analysing Lord Randal, we're analysing Geordie, the English version. Our book text introduces the counting of stressed and unstressed syllables in medieval ballads but the answer seem to get me confused because it is said that there is a mixed of four and three stressed syllables lines without indicating the lines. Can you tell me what the lines are, what the stressed and unstressed syllables are and if we can specify if they are iambic or anapest feet? Thanks in advance, I really need your help!"

As I walk’d o’er London Bridge
One misty morning early
I overheard a fair pretty maid,
Was lamenting for her Geordie.

"O, my Geordie will be hang’d in a golden chain,
’tis not the chain of many,
He was born from King’s royal breed
And lost to a virtuous lady."

Go bridle me my milk-white steed,
Go bridle me my pony,
I will ride to London’s Court
To plead for the life of Geordie.

"O Geordie never stole nor cow, nor calf,
He never hurted any,
Stole sixteen of the King’s royal deer
And he sold them in Bohenny.

"Two pretty babes have I born,
The third lies in my body,
I’d freely part to them ev’ry one
If you’d spare the life of Geordie."

The judge look’d over his left shoulder,
He said, "Fair maid, I’m sorry,
So, fair maid, you must be gone,
For I cannot pardon Geordie."

O my Geordie will be hang’d in a golden chain,
’tis not the chain of many,
Stole sixteen of the King’s royal deer
And he sold them in Bohenny.

Hi Rosanna, you've got an especially interesting poem to decipher. Ballads are made challenging by the fact that they were originally intended to be sung rather than spoken. Song-writers often feel like they have more flexibility in their writing than poets who intend their poems to be spoken. The reason for this is that it's easier to cram extra syllables into a song; all you have to do is take a quarter note and change it into two eighth notes, and you've put an extra unaccented syllable between your accented syllables.

To see this illustrated, a good starting point is to find an audio recording of the ballad and listen to it. Here's one I found. The lyrics are not exactly the same as the copy you sent me, but they're fairly close. Geordie Ballad on YouTube.

One of the best lines to hear this "syllable cramming" that I mentioned above is the first line of the repeated chorus in the video:

"He never stole a cow, never stole a calf"

When you listen to that line, you can hear that the singer is really working to fit extra syllables in. In particular, "stole a" in the first half of the line and "never" in the second half are jammed together to make the line of music flow. If you focus your attention on what syllables get accented here, what you'll hear is:

'he NEV-er stole a COW, nev-er STOLE a CALF"

Interesting, isn't it, that the first time the word "never" shows up it has an accented syllable, but the second time it shows up, the entire word gets jammed into the space between two accented syllables. This sort of thing makes poetry both interesting and challenging!

If I were going to break this down by accented and unaccented syllables, I might replace each unaccented syllable by a lower case "x" and each accented by an exclamation mark. It would look like this:

x ! x x x ! x x ! x !.

This doesn't seem terribly helpful; the number of unaccented syllables does not stay consistent throughout the line. However, at the very least we can tell that there are four accented syllables in this line. Now let's look at the next line:

"He never murdered any."

This one is much more straightforward, and if you just simply read it aloud, you would hopefully hear the natural rhythm of it:

"he NEV-er MUR-dered AN-y"

So this one is: x ! x ! x ! x, which has three accented syllables.

The next line is "STOLE six-TEEN of the KING'S ro-yal DEER" , which is: ! x ! x x ! x x !. 

And finally: "and he SOLD them IN bo-HENN-ey" or: x x ! x ! x ! x.

Let's put it all together to make an accent "map" of the chorus:

x ! x x x ! x x ! x !
x ! x ! x ! x
! x ! x x ! x x !
x x ! x ! x ! x

If you count up the exclamation marks in each line, you'll find that the pattern for the number of accents in each line is 4 - 3 - 4 - 3, which answers the first part of your question.

Now to answer whether it's anapestic or iambic (or something else altogether), I looked at the second line and noticed that it is almost perfectly iambic (unstressed, stressed), except for the extraneous unaccented syllable. On the other hand, the very next line is missing an unaccented syllable at the beginning, which makes up for it. So my money is on this being iambic heptameter (because a line of four and a line of three add up to a total of seven iambs). To convince myself that I'm right about this, I go back and listen again, and everywhere I hear the singer doing "syllable cramming", I replace the crammed syllables with a single unaccented mark:

x ! x ! x ! x !
x ! x ! x ! x
! x ! x ! x !
x ! x ! x ! x

Aside from the fact that we have two lines that end with an extra unaccented syllable, this is iambic.

So now that you know this is a very "loose" iambic heptameter, you can go back to your version of the ballad, feeling confident of what the meter is. Your only challenges, then, are determining which syllables get stressed, and figuring out where the "syllable cramming" happens. Good luck!

Incidentally, as a side note, I think that the addition of those unaccented syllables at the end of each pair of lines gives it a sense of being unfinished, which adds to the melancholy feel of the piece.

After a few back-and-forth messages with Rosanna, here are a few more helpful tips for people trying to parse accented/unaccented syllables in a poem:

• Once you think you've figured it out, read it out loud, strongly emphasising (speaking loudly) the syllables you marked as stressed. This may help you identify mistakes you've made.
• If you know how many stressed syllables there are supposed to be in each line, that's very helpful information, because while a poet may mess with the unstressed syllables, they're less likely to change up the number of stressed syllables. 
• You're unlikely to find two stressed syllables in a row.

Seventh grader Brooke from Pennsylvania writes: "Professor Puzzler, I finished your article about stressed and unstressed syllables, and it has helped me a lot! I’m in the process of writing my first sonnet and trying to juggle rhyme, iambic pentameter, and the structure of the sonnet is super difficult—especially since I still struggle with finding the stressed syllable. My main questions are: how do you know if single syllable words are stressed or unstressed? Is there anyway to check? Thank you!"

Hi Brooke, that's a great question. I'm so pleased to hear of students working to develop sonnets; the hard work you put in on such a daunting task will serve you well in your future poetry endeavors. What seems like a struggle and a juggle now will eventually become more and more natural to you. Eventually the meter will flow with much less conscious thought on your part.

But, in the meantime, I'll attempt to answer your question. There are certain words in the English language which are deemed "less important." I don't mean that we can get by without them; many sentences would be incomprehensible without them. But they are words that we often don't even consciously notice*. They are words like articles (a, an, the) prepositions (on, of, in, etc.), and conjunctions (and, but, or, that, which, etc.). Linking verbs (is, are, etc.) can be added to this list. These "lesser" words, if they have only one syllable, will typically will be unstressed in the context of a sentence. In contrast, one-syllable words which play a significant role in the sentence (such as nouns and non-linking verbs) will most likely be stressed in a poem.

One of my favorite example poems to look at is "The Night Before Christmas" -- consider the first line with unstressed syllables capitalized:

'twas the NIGHT before CHRISTmas and ALL through the HOUSE

Notice those single-syllable words that are not stressed -- there are so many prepositions, articles, and conjunctions!

Now, I said that this is typically true, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule. Context plays a very key part in identifying the stressed syllables. Consider the following two sentences:

The CAR is ON the gaRAGE.
The CAR IS on the gaRAGE.

In the second sentence, the verb "is" has the stress, but in the first sentence, the preposition "on" is stressed. Why is that? Presumably in the first sentence, someone is startled because they didn't expect the car to be ON the garage (rather than IN it). But in the second sentence, it sounds as though someone has disagreed with them, so they are emphatically declaring the truth of the statement by emphasising the verb.

There's a bit of flexibility with these "lesser" words; the meaning you intend to convey can control whether they are stressed, but also, if you have two or three of them in a row, the natural rhythm of the sentence may dictate where the stress goes. Consider my rewrite of the first line of "The Night Before Christmas": 

it WAS the NIGHT beFORE the YULEtide, AND all THROUGH the HOUSE

What have I done to this line? I've rewritten it so it has an iambic meter. Read that out loud, putting the emphasis on my upper-case syllables. Now compare my line to the actual anapestic line. I've included many of the same words, but the rhythm dictated that they be emphasized differently. "Before" gets one of its syllables stressed in my line, but not the other. In my line, "and" and "through" get the stress, while "all" does not, and this is exactly the opposite of the original line where "all" gets the stress, while "and" and "through" do not. Why do I get away with doing this? Because I'm not messing with the stress of "important" words like "night," "yuletide," and "house."

How do you tell what you can get away with? You read your line aloud, and listen to hear whether you are naturally emphasizing certain syllables or not. Then read it with the stress you'd like the syllables to have, and see if it sounds awkward.

Eventually you'll stop analyzing stresses syllable-by-syllable and go straight to listening to how it sounds.

* Book Scrounger notes that many of these "lesser" words are words which are not capitalized in headlines and titles. If you look at the title of this blog post, you'll notice that there is one uncapitalized word in the title. It's the conjunction "and." The exception to this is linking verbs, which are always capitalized in headlines and titles.

An anonymous reader asks, "How do you get good at 'listening' for iambic pentameters?"

Poetry, like music, has rhythm. In music, the rhythm is established using a few different intstruments. In a band, the drummer and the bass guitarist are the primary rhythm-holders. Those deep, bassy sounds like the guitar and the kick (bass) drum set our subwoofers to vibrating, and mimic our own heart rhythms.  In some music, the rhythm is prominently defined by the kick drum and the snare drum. A GEICO ad from awhile back made this point with a pig singing "Boots and pants and boots and pants and..."

The words "boots" and "pants" represent the kick drum*, and the word "and" represents the snare. The kick drum provides the primary driving beat, and the snare represents what we call the "off-beat".

So the pig is actually giving you the beat of a song.

You can feel the rhythm of that if you repeat it over and over, and if you do it just right, it's almost indistinguishable from a techno band.

The rhythm of a poem (in poetry, we call it the "meter" of the poem) can be understood in terms of kick drums and snares, which means it can also be understood in terms of phrases like "boots-and-pants-and". In poetry, we have stressed syllables and unstressed syllables. Stressed syllables correspond to the driving "kick" beat, and the unstressed syllables correspond to the off-beat of the snare. So what does iambic pentameter look like?

and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS.

Notice that we start with the snare, or the off-beat, and we end with the kick. Also notice that we have 5 kick beats. This is why it's called penta-meter; "penta" is five and "meter" is rhythm, so pentameter is a five-rhythm.

The nice thing about having five kicks in a line is that you've got five fingers on one hand, so while you are saying "and boots and pants..." each time you say either "boots" or "pants" you can tap a finger on the table, and when you've tapped all five fingers, you've completed a line of the rhythm. So if you want to get good at listening for iambic pentameter, do this repeatedly. Say the "and-boots" pattern while tapping out the kick beat on your fingers. If you want, after you do the fifth finger, give a little pause, and then start all over again:

and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS [pause] and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS-and-PANTS-and-BOOTS [pause] etc.

After awhile, that rhythm will get ingrained in you, and you'll be doing it without even thinking about it. Now let's take a look at something that's written in iambic pentameter:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heav'n
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. (Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)

If you've got that "boots-and-pants" thing going through your mind, it'll be easier to see that this is iambic pentameter:

the QUAL i TY of MER cy IS not STRAIN'D
it DROPP eth AS the GEN tle RAIN from HEAV'N
u PON the PLACE be NEATH: it IS twice BLEST;
it BLESS eth HIM that GIVES and HIM that TAKES.

Can you feel the rhythm of it?

Important Disclaimers

1. Thinking "and-boots-and-pants" may be a great way to recognize and understand the rhythm of poetry, but it is NOT a good way to read poetry; nobody wants to hear Shakespeare sounding like techno music**. Instead, you should use boots-and-pants to help you recognize where the beats are, but then once you've understood which syllables get the stress, you're going to read this in your normal reading voice, without giving unnecessary extra accent to any syllables.
2. Also, even though when you practiced the rhythm, you left a pause between lines, you won't necessarily do that when reading a poem. Focus on the meaning of the lines; if a line does not complete a thought, you're not going to pause at the end of it. And if a thought is completed within a line, you're going to pause there. Remember that meaning is most important, and rhythm serves the poem, not the other way around! So with this in mind, the Shakespeare piece would be read like this:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd, [pause]
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heav'n upon the place beneath; [pause]
It is twice blest; [pause]
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Other Meters

The "boots-and-pants" idea can be used to recognize other meters as well. For example, if you want to get the feel for anapestic tetrameter, you should start thinking:

and-the-BOOTS-and-the-PANTS-and-the-BOOTS-and-the-PANTS.

Notice that we've added the word "the" after the word "and" each time. This gives the meter a "triplet" feel. Also note that we only hit four driving beats in a line instead of five. So if you're counting this on your fingers, leave out your thumb.

You can see this rhythm in the well known Christmas poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas":

twas the NIGHT be fore CHRIST mas and ALL through the HOUSE
not a CREA ture was STIRR ing not E ven a MOUSE

* Technically, "boo" and "pan" represent the kick, and the "ts" represents the hi-hat. Thus, we really break it down like this: BOO-ts-and-PAN-ts-and.

** Well, okay, maybe "techno-shakespeare" should be a thing. But I'm not sure your poetry teacher will appreciate it! 

"Can you explain terza rima and give an example?" ~Anon, grade 5

Terza Rima is an Italian phrase that means "third rhyme." It's a specific way of rhyming lines in a poem. I think of it as sort of a revolving door of rhymes. In each stanza of a Terza Rima poem, there are two lines that rhyme, and one line that does not. The line that doesn't rhyme provides the rhyming syllable for the next stanza. Even though it doesn't rhyme with other lines in that stanza, it provides a connection to the next stanza, thus building the whole poem into a progressive, seamless whole.

In a Terza Rima poem, the last stanza often has two rhyming lines (that's called a couplet).

In other words, the rhyme scheme looks something like this:

ABA - BCB - CDC - DD

If you wanted more than four stanzas, you could chain together as many stanzas as you want in this format.

If you have a hard time following that explanation, here's a silly poem I wrote just for you, that uses the Terza Rima rhyme scheme:

Candy Land

I dreamed the world was made of cookie dough.
The skies were filled with cotton candy clouds,
And from them blew a storm of whipped-cream snow.

The fields of chocolate, farmers left unplowed;
The stalks of candy-cane grew everywhere,
And gum-drops grew on bushes, low but proud.

Oh, nothing in this world seemed quite so fair
As pine tree branches bowed with sugar cones -
Enough for all the hungry crowds to share.

A whiff of spearmint on the wind was blown
O'er milk-shake streams and maple syrup lakes.
I shouted from atop my candied throne:

"This world of ours, it really takes the cake -
If it's a dream, I do not wish to wake!"

^{Copyright 2017 by Douglas Twitchell}

Incidentally, Robert Frost wrote a terza rima sonnet titled "Acquainted with the Night." In addition, his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is not Terza Rima, but it's a very similar "chained" rhyme; each stanza has four lines. The third line doesn't rhyme with the others, but it does introduce the rhyme for the next stanza. The rhyme scheme looks like this:

 AABA - BBCB - CCDC - DDDD