Loose Change

Diving deep into the dactyls

I am busy working on a collection of children's poetry, mostly humorous or silly. One surprising thing to realize about great children's poets is how carefully they write. Plenty of people try to "write like Dr. Seuss", but without understanding the metric rules, it usually falls short. See my essay on Newspeak and the language of poetic form  for more details on that.

I'll admit, I have to re-learn over and over the correct terms for poetic stuff. I remember some things, but not enough. The reason to learn them is so that when I find poems I really like, ones I've written or ones written by others, I have to do my best effort at scansion. That's a fancy word for scanning the lines of the poem very carefully to determine the meter and rhyme scheme (if any). One reason I put explanatory notes about the form at the end of many of my poems is so I don't have to do this again and again. But I don't always remember. So, today I had to scan a poem I wrote a while back because I'd like to get this same sound and feel for a silly children's poem I am writing about schoolwork.

If I have re-learned everything correctly, my poem Too Dang Hot  is a humorous Pantuom in Dactylic tetrameter brachycatalectic.

Now, there's a mouthful. Without going into great detail, that means that each line has four dactyls, except the final two unstressed syllables of the line are left off. For example, the first line is:

Bugger, this weather's impossibly hot

and if I put the stressed syllables in bold and separate the feet in square brackets and show the missing syllables with dashes, I get:

[Bug ger, this]  [weath er's im]  [poss i bly]  [hot - -]

While almost nobody cares about the details when reading the poem, this is part of the secret sauce that makes a poem easy and fun to read over and over, a key ingredient for poems for kids. You don't have to follow the rules perfecly, but understanding the rules allows you to know when it is okay to vary them and when not.

Addendum: A cool fact that I just realized after writing this is that Jack Prelutsky's Homework! Oh, Homework!   uses almost precisely this meter. He breaks up the lines in the middle, which might work better for kids, and given the way he adds a destressed syllable at the beginning of some lines, you could argue it is really anapestic tetrameter brachycatalectic. Mine could be that as well, if you simply look at the stresses with the missing syllables at the beginning. An anapest is two unstressed followed by a stressed, so I could interpret my poem or Prelutsky's as the following

[- - Bug]  [ger, this weath]  [er's im poss]  [i bly hot]