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Back Page FOR BETTER OR FOR VERSE

By Charles Matthews |

Handily, friskily,

Haldeman, Ehrlichman

Said, “We’ve bugged Watergate:

Come take a look!”

But their Boss chided them

Unsympathetically:

“Don’t tell such things to me;

I’m not a crook!”



Of all silly pastimes – like golf, tennis, backgammon and macramé – writing double dactyls is probably the silliest. And like the others, it can develop into an obsession. At parties, double dactyl writers can be terrible bores, since they spend all of their time trying to meet people with the right names. Introduce one to an Adelaide Mandel-baum or a HermanG.Breckenridge,and you’ll have him in ecstasy. And if Adelaide happens to be a plenipotentiary or if Herman’s religion turns out to be an-throposophical, your double dactylist will probably faint dead away.

Briefly, for the unhooked, a double dactyl is an eight-line poem in a very fixed form. Each line except the fourth and eighth is a pair of dactyls – you remember: DUM-da-da – the metre of Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” (“THIS is the FORest priMEval, the MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks,” etc.) The first line is usually either a nonsense phrase (“higgledy-piggledy” is common) or a pair of adverbs. The second line has to be a proper name (or several closely related names) that scans as a double dactyl. The sixth line must be a single word. Only the fourth and eighth lines rhyme, and they usually, for the sake of euphony and closure, scan as a single dactyl plus a stressed syllable (DUM-da-da-DUM).

Wait. Don’t go away. Here’s another example to clarify things:



Wibbledy-wobbledy

Madame de Pompadour

Worked all her charms on the

King at a dance.

I think she did it all

Unmeretriciously.

Vive la difference!

Vive la France!



I’ll admit that I took a few liberties with metre and rhyme there, but it gives you the idea.

Not many people in this day of plain Janes and John Does have double-dactyl names. So most verses are about historical or literary figures. What better subject than the dull of ancient days, as John Dryden called them. Maybe that’s unfair: the English Romantic poets weren’t dull – just peculiar – as this poem about two of them suggests. In case you’ve forgotten, Coleridge was always trying to convince people he was a philosopher, and Wordsworth had this thing about his sister Dorothy.



“Fiddle-dee, faddle-dee,

Samuel T. Coleridge,”

Said William Wordsworth, “I’ll

Just have to miss

Hearing you lecture on

Epistemology.

I’m going walking at

Tintern with Sis.”



In fact, double dactyls tend to hauntEnglish departments. This one is by Margaret Blum of the English department at SMU. Ms. Blum is amused by the Belle of Amherst’s habit of writing lines like “inebriate of air am I/And debauchee of dew”:



Busily-buzzily

Emily Dickinson

Sipped from a flower and

Got drunk on dew.

Judge Otis Lord asked her

Semicensoriously,

“If you’re a bee, honey,

Must I be, too?”



Another SMU English department type (and sometime D Magazine dance critic), Willard Spiegelman, wrote the following about the Nineties’ most famous literary cause célèbre:



Hastily, chastily,

Marquis of Queensbury

Muttered and sputtered at

Poor Oscar Wilde,

“I don’t object to love

Homoerotical,

But I insist on this:

Not with my child!”



Pairs of names are okay – even three names, as Willard Spiegelman’s contribution about a well-known musical ensemble shows:



Slippily, sloppily,

Rose, Stern and Istomin

Played a Brahms trio be-

fore a full house.

Flinging his violin

Melodramatically,

Stern muttered, “Leonard, you

Sure are a louse.”



As you can see, the double dactyl is really only a tougher relation of the limerick. And like the limerick, it inevitably lends itself to the scurrilous, scatological, or just simply tacky. The author of the following double dactyl prefers to remain anonymous, claiming that the bad taste displayed is not his but his Muse’s:



Frigidly, frostily,

Eleanor Roosevelt

Said to her husband, “My

Passion’s quite gone.

Seeing your crutches is

Anaphrodisiac.”

“Strange,” said her husband, “They

Turn Lucy on.”



If there are closet double dactylistsout there, let us hear from you. Wedon’t promise anything – no color TVsets, no free subscriptions – but ifenough of you respond, we may giveyou your brief shining moment on this page.

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