Forget the limerick and the haiku, I have been reading today about double dactyls, an extremely structured comical verse form. A dactyl is three syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, like “blankety”.

The double dactyl verse form is 8 lines

Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blank

Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blankety
Blankety blank

But there’s more rules than that!

• The first line has to be nonsense – hickory dickery and higgledy piggledy seem to be favourite;
• The second line has to be someone’s name
• One of the lines in the second stanza has to be a single word
• The last lines of the stanzas rhyme.

The example given in UMRA, where I’ve been reading about this, was by Wendy Cope:

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.

Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.

A quick google finds a page for the form on Wikipedia, with a few elegant examples – I liked Brian Flanagan’s:

Hey-nonny, ho-nonny,
Penis Van Lesbian
Entered the bus’ness that
no biz is like.

Keen on increasing his
marketability,
he took on the stage name
of Dick Van Dyke

Further googling finds the Braden Files, with three pages of double dactyls here, here and here. So enamoured of the format is the writer that the “about” page is also in the form. Each of the examples is brilliant, many of them about figures I know nada about.  One particularly brainy one is in Latin, but of all them, my favourite is

Pitter pat, pitter pat.
Noah of Ararat
Heard the rain cease on the
Fortieth night.
Shem, Ham, and Japheth said
Antediluvian
Meteorologists
Called it just right.

It’s an extremely dense format, and the challenge in writing them for yourself is the dual problems of finding a double dactyl name, and a single dactyl word, and then putting the lot together with enough other stuff to make sense. Limericks and haiku are trivially simple by comparison.

Here’s my first attempt:

Diddledy-diddledy
Christopher Ecclestone
Famously portrayed a
Doctor named Who

Flying about with a
Relativistically
Capable copper box
Without a loo.

I’m not the first to attempt a sciffy double dactyl.  Further googling finds this wonderful discussion thread  with many further fabulous attempts – some clearly baby-steps, some extraordinarily well honed.

The sciffy one, by a poster called Badger, takes us to a galaxy far, far away

Foolishly, Ghoulishly,
Anakin Skywalker,
Took his light sabre from
Light side to Dark,

Known later as Vader,
His son fell his caper,
Paterfamilias,
Losing his spark!

Midway down the thread is a huge list of double dactyl words, culminating in the quite possibly solitary quadruple dactyl word  paradichloroaminobenzaldehyde.

Finally, the thread is taken over in style by Chris Doyle, who has had numerous verses published under various names:

Higgledy piggledy
Little Red Riding Hood
Skips to a fate that she
Doesn’t deserve.

Lying ahead is an
Anthropophagical
Wolf for whom Grandma was
Just an hors d’oeuvre.

and this one, where every possible line is a single double dactyl word:

Flappity clappity
August von Wassermann
Bacteriologist.
Germany’s best.

Extracurricular
Heterosexual.
(Overpromiscuous.)
Flunked his own test.