No, not that kind of Dactyl. Thanks to Alex Mellen (http://amediting.blogspot.com/) for reminding me to make this pun.
Have I told you about my Creative Writing class? It's wonderful. Professor Bowman is one of my favorites; a youngish man (mid 30's?) with messy brown hair swept off to one side, who wears worn suit-jackets with jeans and beige button-downs. Sometimes, the jackets have elbow patches. Those are my favorite days.
He's a poet who also knows about other forms of writing, especially creative nonfiction, so the poetry sections are always especially interesting. Today, he discussed various elements of rhyme and meter. All the professor's chatter inspired my muse to start musing, so, while he talked, I scribbled a quick poem in my notebook, which went something like this:
Dance on the graves of the ocean of snakes as they wriggle about your knees,
Shoot down the moon on the guardian's tomb in the forest without any trees.
Take all the fire of the hearthrug's desire as you turn it all cold and gray,
And hear ye the bleat of the murderous sheep while the shepherd is away.
"I want you to write a structured poem," Professor Bowman said, interrupting my scribblings. "Use one of the poetic forms I just talked about. Every time I give this exercise, some students say that working with a structure is really frustrating for them, and others say that it's really freeing."
As I observed the lines I'd just jotted down, a sneaking suspicion took me. So, I measured the rhythm, and found that, sure enough, I'd already completed the exercise. The poem I'd just written was a dactyl, with a few deviant syllables.
Dactyls take the form of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, such as the word longitude. Lon-gi-tude. Get it? So, in my poem (/ stands for stressed; ^ stands for unstressed):
/ ^ ^ / ^ ^ / ^ ^ / ^ ^ / ^ ^ / ^ ^
Dance on the graves of the ocean of snakes as they wriggle about your knees,
Get it now? I think that's correct, except the last line of the poem isn't a correct dactyl, I don't think, and I adjusted the other lines very slightly to fit. But you get the idea. I find it interesting that I used this form without intending it, or even knowing what it was. Seems as if the ideas of meter and rhythm are wired into us, created by the proliferation of music and poetry that we're bombarded with on a daily basis.
