Dactyl
A dactyl is a metrical foot in poetry consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. It is often used in classical poetry and can create a rolling, rhythmic effect. In English poetry, dactyls are less common than in classical verse but can still be found in certain forms and styles.
8 Key excerpts on "Dactyl"
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...By many, the Dactyl is expressly set down as an inferior foot, which they imagine is used only for the occasional diversification of an iambic, trochaic, or anapestic line. Thus Everett: "It is never used except as a secondary foot, and then in the first place of the line."— English Versification, p. 122. On this order of verse, Lindley Murray bestowed only the following words: "The DactylIC measure being very uncommon, we shall give only one example of one species of it:— Fr=om th~e l~ow pl=eas~ures ~of th=is f~all~en n=at~ure, Rise we to higher, &c."— Gram., 12mo, p. 207; 8vo, p. 257. Read this example with "we rise" for "Rise we," and all the poetry of it is gone! Humphrey says, " Dactyle verse is seldom used, as remarked heretofore; but is used occasionally, and has three metres; viz. of 2, 3, and 4 feet. Specimens follow. 2 feet. Free from anxiety. 3 feet. Singing most sweetly and merrily. 4 feet. Dactylic measures are wanting in energy."— English Prosody, p. 18. Here the prosodist has made his own examples; and the last one, which unjustly impeaches all Dactylics, he has made very badly—very prosaically; for the word " Dactylic," though it has three syllables, is properly no Dactyl, but rather an amphibrach. OBS. 7.—By the Rev. David Blair, this order of poetic numbers is utterly misconceived and misrepresented. He says of it, "DactylIC verse consists of a short syllable, with one, two, or three feet, and a long syllable ; as, 'D~istr=act~ed w~ith w=oe, 'I'll r=ush ~on th~e f=oe.' ADDISON."— Blair's Pract. Gram., p. 119. "'Y~e sh=eph~erds s~o ch=eerf~ul ~and g=ay, 'Wh~ose fl=ocks n~ev~er c=arel~essl~y r=oam; 'Sh~ould C=or~yd~on's h=app~en t~o str=ay, 'Oh! c=all th~e p=oor w=and~er~ers h=ome.' SHENSTONE."— Ib., p. 120. It is manifest, that these lines are not Dactylic at all. There is not a Dactyl in them. They are composed of iambs and anapests...
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Prosodists who tell us that the Dactyl necessarily makes a somber or melancholy rhythm must have forgotten their nursery days. Once again, the very oddness of this foot makes it appropriate to such droll and frisky effects as we find in these children’s verses (their prosody is adult enough). Notice too how the speed of the Dactyl can be utilized. In (iii), where the dog is going at a merry clip, the speed of both trisyllabic feet is exploited: Dactylic in the first line, anapestic in the second. The Dactyl is probably even better suited to such comic and exuberant effects than to elegiac ones. Linguistic peculiarity and speed are no embarrassment in a light-hearted context. (v) Hail to the brightness of Zion’s glad morning; Joy to the lands that in darkness have lain; Hushed be the accents of sorrow and mourning; Zion in triumph begins her mild reign. The meter of these lines by Thomas Hastings is as banal as the language, which is hymnal cliché. The meter is perfectly regular, and such inflexibility is wooden enough in itself; but to make matters worse, this slick, pat, “commercial” rhythm is completely in conflict with the grandeur and masculine strength of the vision. The experience proposed is one of joy and exaltation, but the speed and abnormality of rhyming Dactylic meter can result only in hollow and pretty sentiment. SPONDAIC AND PYRRHIC When stresses occur in succession, meaning almost always demands that some be heavier than others. Consequently, there are few or no true spondees in English verse. But notice in the lines above, from Yeats’s “Among School Children,” that the stresses on the syllables of the third and fourth feet of the first line, and of the fourth foot of the second line, are more nearly spondees than iambs...
eBook - ePubVeni Vidi Didici
Have Fun Learning Latin with Songs, Games, Puzzles and Jokes
- Jason Talley(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Ulysses Press(Publisher)
...the Odyssey, Vergil in the Aeneid, and Ovid in the Metamorphoses. Juvenal (page 94) and Horace (page 89) wrote in Dactylic hexameter in their satires, and the philosopher-poet Lucretius made use of it in his De rerum natura. Dactylic hexameter is made up of six (Greek hex) feet, each of which are either Dactyls or spondees. Each of the first four feet can be either spondees or Dactyls, the fifth foot is always a Dactyl, and the sixth foot is always a spondee. Most lines are separated by a brief pause, called a caesura, which is represented by two slashes (//). These two lines, apparently from Ennius, which name the Olympian gods, is a good illustration of (and provides practice in) Dactylic hexameter: FAMOUS FIRST LINES OF LATIN POEMS Of war I sing and the man who first from the shores of Troy… —Vergil, Aeneid (the book of Aeneas) The spirit moves me to speak of forms transformed into new things… —Ovid, Metamorphoses (the book of changes) Oh you Muses who beat great Olympus with your feet [Get it—like metrical feet?] —Ennius, Annales (annals/history) O! Aeneas’s mother, desire of men and of gods. . . —Lucretius, De rerum natura (on the nature of things) Will I always be one a listener? Will I never repay. . .? —Juvenal, Satire I A painter (should she want to join) the neck of a horse with the head of a human. . . —Horace, Ars poetica (the art of poetry) Once upon a time pines born on the top of Mount Pelion. . . —Catullus 64 You buy everything, Castor. And so it will happen that you will sell it all. —Martial 7.98 ELEGAIC COUPLETS This meter is interesting because of the way its second line employs stops: The first line is the same as the Dactylic hexameter line discussed above. The second line is made up of two parts: the first has variety, two Dactyls or spondees followed by a single long syllable; the second has no variety, two Dactyls followed by a single long syllable...
eBook - ePub- James B Greenough, J. H. Allen, G. L. Kittredge(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...They will here be used in accordance with their ancient meaning, as has now become more common. This metrical accent, recurring at regular intervals of time, is what constitutes the essence of the rhythm of poetry as distinguished from prose, and should be constantly kept in mind. The error mentioned arose from applying to trochaic and Dactylic verse a definition which was true only of iambic or anapaestic. 1 The word Verse (versus) signifies a turning back, i.e. to begin again in like manner, as opposed to Prose (prorsus or prôversus), which means straight ahead. 2 This usage is comparatively rare, most cases where it appears to be found being caused by the retention of an originally long quantity. 3 The practice of Elision is followed in Italian and French poetry, and is sometimes adopted in English, particularly in the older poets: — T’ inveigle and invite th’ unwary sense. — Comus 538. In early Latin poetry a final syllable ending in s often loses this letter even before a consonant (cf. § 15. 7): — seniō cōnfectu s quiēscit.—Enn. (Cat. M. 14). 1 Called pentameter by the old grammarians, who divided it, formally, into five feet (two Dactyls or spondees, a spondee, and two anapaests), as follows: — 2 The time of this pause, however, may be filled by the protraction of the preceding syllable: — 1 The greater freedom of substitution in the comedy is due to the fact that the verse is regarded as made up of separate feet rather than of dipodies. 1 Different Greek poets adopted fixed types in regard to the place of the Dactyls, and so a large number of verses arose, each following a strict law, which were imitated by the Romans as distinct metres. 1 The figures refer to the foregoing list (§ 625). 1 The two principal theories only are given...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 METRE AND RHYTHM English verse is a succession of syllables. Some are strongly emphasized, some are not. The pattern of metre is set up by the way in which heavily stressed syllables are interspersed with more lightly stressed syllables. The metrical patterns are termed ‘feet’. The main types of feet are as follows. The iamb: this consists of one lightly stressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. ‘Revolve’, ‘behind’, ‘before’, ‘aloud’ are all iambs. The trochee is the iamb reversed. It consists of one stressed and one lightly stressed syllable. ‘Forward’, ‘backward’, ‘rabbit’, ‘orange’ are all trochees. These two metrical feet, iamb and trochee, each consist of two syllables. But it is possible to have three syllables in a foot, as follows. An anapaest consists of two lightly stressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. ‘Repossess’ and ‘understand’ are examples. A Dactyl is an anapaest reversed. It consists of one stressed syllable followed by two lightly stressed syllables. ‘Pulverize’ and ‘agitate’ are Dactylic feet. The intermediate pattern, when a stressed syllable is flanked fore and aft by two lightly stressed syllables, is called an amphibrach: ‘redouble’, ‘confetti’. Such examples as are given here should not be taken to be fixed, as a mathematical quantity would be. They should be regarded rather as indicators. The weight of stress can vary appreciably according to context, especially when that context departs from a metrical norm. What is a metrical norm? In order to form a line of verse, each foot is repeated several times. The more times the foot is repeated, the longer the line becomes. It should be emphasized that one rarely comes across a line that is entirely anapaestic, or entirely Dactylic, or entirely amphibrachic. Usually, with a line made up of trisyllabic feet, there is a mixture of patterns. A dimeter is what we would call a line consisting of two feet. An iambic dimeter would be ‘The passive heart’...
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Below I list, with illustrative examples, the major foot structures that can be found with any regularity. Some are much more common than others, the iambic foot being by far the most widespread in English verse. The trochee is reasonably common, and the others are more rare: iamb X / (‘di dum’) trochee / X (‘dum di’) anapaest X X / (‘di di dum’) Dactyl / X X (‘dum di di’) It is also possible to get poetic feet which have three light syllables in the remiss position, or where the ictus has a light syllable on either side of it, but these foot patterns are too rare to detain us here. Now let us restrict our discussion for a moment to lines of poetry with iambic ('di dum') feet. Normally, iambic lines will consist of more than one iamb, and poets can choose how many iambs to have as the basic line-template for particular poems. One particular form has dominated English poetry since the fifteenth—century, however, namely a line with five iambs, as in the following example: Example 2 X/X/X/X/X/- Then tooke the angrie witch her golden cup X/X/X/X /X/- Which still she bore, replete with magick artes; (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 14) This kind of line is found throughout the verse of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, for example, and is called iambic pentameter (literally 'iambic five metre'). We might call the iambic pentameter line the metrical norm for English poetry from the fifteenth—century onwards. Other possibilities can, of course, be found: These 'number of feet' combinations can in principle involve any kind of foot as the basic unit, and various stanza forms can have patterns involving differing numbers of feet from line to line (for example, Keats's 'Song', which we analysed in 2.2.7, has tetrameters in the first and third lines of each verse and trimeters in the second and fourth lines). But it is the iamb in units of five which is the dominant English verse form. Exercise 1 (a) Re-examine Keats's 'Song' in 2.2.7...
eBook - ePubEnglish Phonetics and Phonology
An Introduction
- Philip Carr(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...9 Rhythm, Reversal and Reduction 9.1 More on the Trochaic Metrical Foot We said, in Chapter 8, that the rhythm of English is trochaic : the basic rhythmic pattern consists of a stressed syllable followed by zero or more unstressed syllables. For instance, in the phrase made in a factory, the metrical structure is [ˈmeɪdɪnəˈfæktəɹi]. The two trochaic feet here are [ˈmeɪdɪnə] and [ˈfæktəɹi]. We assumed too that syllables with secondary stress also form trochaic metrical feet, as in the word academic : [ˌækəˈdɛmɪk]. The two trochaic metrical feet here are [ˌækə] and [ˈdɛmɪk]: the secondary stress in [ˌækə] forms a trochaic metrical foot with the following unstressed syllable, and the primary stress in [ˈdɛmɪk] forms a trochaic metrical foot with the following unstressed syllable. But what is the evidence for the metrical foot? And what evidence is there for our claim that all feet in English are trochaic? We will now address these questions. 9.1.1 Evidence for the Trochaic Metrical Foot (a): Rhyming Although we have identified a constituent within the syllable widely known as the rhyme, the term is a misnomer: this constituent is not the unit on which rhyming in English is based. While it is true that bad rhymes with mad, and that both contain the rhyme [æd], we must not be misled into thinking that two words rhyme only if they have identical rhyme constituents in the syllable, in this case [æd]. Consider the words witty and city : they rhyme because they both have a trochaic metrical foot of the same sort: [ˈwɪti] and [ˈsɪti]. Clearly, onset consonants play no role in rhyming, but metrical structure does, and the rhyme constituent does not. The reason why entity does not rhyme with either witty or city is that the metrical foot structure of entity is [ˈɛntɪti]: the word entity does not contain a metrical foot of the shape [ˈɪti]...
eBook - ePub- G. S. Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In non-comic verse, iambic substitution is less frequent. The example of Dactylic metre which we gave in comparing a passage by Robert Graves with one by Skelton is probably as effective an example of this metre, one not very natural or easy to use in English stress-syllable verse, as one could find. Saintsbury notes that a long line of Tennyson’s is probably intended as an eight-foot line in Dactylics: Whén fr m th / térr rs f/ Nátůre å/ peópl håve/ fáshio ed a d/ wórsh p å/ spír t f/ Év l, but that it reads best as an anapaestic line with a push-off stressed syllable (technically called an anacrusis, in English sometimes a ‘catch’). The following passage from Tennyson’s Maud can, I think, be scanned plausibly as Dactylic hexameters with some trochaic substitution. Here is my Dactylic foot-division: Cóld a d/ cléar-cůt / fáce, wh / cóme y u s / crú ll / méek, Breáking å/ slúmb r n/ whích àll /spléenfůl/ foll wås/ drówned … Tennyson, like most poets with a classical education, was very much aware of quantity even when writing stress-syllable verse. My scansion here is based on the conviction that the movement of these lines is basically a falling rather than a rising movement, and that the strong final syllables (which are also rhyming words) need isolation as the first, stressed syllables of uncompleted Dactyls. Simpler examples of Dactylic metre in shorter lines can be found in Victorian short poems, like Tom Hood’s: Óne m re ůn/ fórtůnåte, Weár f/breáth, Ráshl mp/ pórtůnåte, Góne t h r/ deáth … There is room in this chapter, I think, for consideration of one more metre: choriambics. A choriambic foot is composed of a trochee followed by an iambic foot, thus ‘ ° ° ‘, and lines written in choriambics have a pleasantly rocking, almost see-saw effect. J. B...
