On 2 December I spotted an interesting moth on our kitchen window pane. Our local moth expert Dr Dave Chesmore confirmed my ID: it was an Emmelina monodactyla.
A few days later I was reading a book by James Fenton, one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, about different poetry forms (limericks, clerihews and the like) and came across a form I’d never heard of before: the double dactyl.
A dactyl is a metre that goes tum-ti-ti. So a double dactyl goes tum-ti-ti tum-ti-ti. The 2-stanza double-dactyl verse form, Fenton explains,
‘requires that the first line be nonsense words, the second a name, and that a single-word double dactyl appear in the second part.’
This got me thinking … Is it possible, I wondered, to write a double dactyl about our recent moth find, Emmelina monodactyla? And if so, would this be the world’s first monodactylian double dactyl?
I set to work that very evening, and by mid-morning the next day I had created my first - perhaps the first ever - monodactylian double dactyl!
How does it go? Well, you’ll have to come along to a performance of Buzzing! to find out …!
