Victory is Dactylic, Which is Amphibrachic

Many classic poetic works were written in iambic pentameter.  The word pentameter means that each line consists of five “feet”, and the word iambic means that each foot consists of an unstressed syllable (0) and a stressed syllable (1).  Thus each line has the form 01 01 01 01 01. For example, the line “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill” is in iambic pentameter.  The complement of the iambic is called the trochaic, in which each foot has the form 10.

It’s often said that iambic pentameter is the most natural sounding pattern for verse in the English language, but a variety of other patterns can be used.  For example, in the dactylic form, each foot has three syllables with the accent pattern 100.  This was famously used in Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey.  In the anapestic form (sometimes called antidactylic), each foot has the pattern 001.  In the amphibrachic form, each foot has the pattern 010.

One fairly well-known metrical form is anapestic tetrameter, in which each line consists of four feet of the anapestic form.  Thus each line has the form 001 001 001 001. An example of this is “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house”.  This particular meter seems to be associated with light-hearted or even comical verse, and was used extensively by (for example) the children’s book author Dr. Seuss.  Sometimes a syllable is dropped or added to the beginning or ending of a line.  Dropping an unstressed syllable from the beginning of a line is called acephalexis.

One online story-teller has invented a somewhat dim-witted boy named Chad, who went to her high school and was very popular with the girls.  We learn that Chad was held back in school, and that he got some tattoos of himself, including a tattoo of his arm on his arm. This raises a recursive consideration, as alluded to in a cute little sonnet in anapestic tetrameter (with acephalexis) that someone posted, highlighting the difficulty of this kind of self-referential representation.

Recursive Chad

Oh, handsome athletic magnificent Chad,

The most rizzly charmer the school ever had.

When he was a senior, as sexy as sin,

He was the most popular boy about town

The next year, when he was a senior again,

He naturally re-won the homecoming crown.

He had a tattoo of his face on his thigh

Which greatly enhanced his ineffable charm,

And then in a move that made all the girls sigh

He got a tattoo of his arm on his arm.

But he became troubled, it just wouldn’t do,

The arm on his arm didn’t have a tattoo.

So back to the parlor he went to re-group,

And found himself trapped in an infinite loop.

The same internet author has told stories about an evil college Professor, who connives to take advantage of a student, and who resorts to all sorts of trickery and under-handed foul play, including even blackmail. She is similar to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, at least in terms of how she is hated by fans of the stories. Some listeners went so far as to forecast that her evil deeds would doom the Professor to eternal damnation when her day of judgement arrived, although with her record of trickery, this might be overly optimistic. In any case, this gave rise to another example of a sonnet, this one based on what may best be described as amphibrachic tetrameter.

The Professor’s Reckoning

Our business Professor was sure a bad sinner,

She had such a cunning and mean spirit in her.

She preyed on her good-looking talented students

And tried to seduce them.  Oh youthful imprudence!

She tampered with cell phones and meanly coerced,

In tricks and conniving was clearly well-versed.

One couple fought back, had her sent off to jail,

But she lawyered up and was soon out on bail.

She re-turned the tables, left them in a daze,

And smugly resumed her nefarious ways.

When after a lifetime of crime the day came

For meeting her maker, she still had no shame.

The angels in heaven all tried to defeat her

And yet she gained entry – she blackmailed St Peter.

The classifications of metrical forms has some ambiguity (like musical notes, where C sharp is also D flat), especially since syllables can be appended or omitted at the start or end of a line, because some forms are equivalent up to rotations of the bits. Also, poetic lines sometimes have mixtures of different kinds of feet, so we might just characterize the meter of a given line, allowing for accidentals, by the binary form of the entire line.

Among the 2-bit forms are also the trochaic (11) and the pyrrhic (00), but expressions with multiple consecutive stressed bits (“turn turn turn”) seem to be somewhat anomalous in language, and a form consisting solely of unstressed bits is rather reductionist, and could just as well be assigned the 1-bit meter 0. (In this sense a “Pyrrhic victory” is an oxymoron, since “victory” is dactylic.) Excluding the pure 0 forms, and any forms that would give two stressed consecutive bits, the only viable binary bi-feet are 01 and 10, and the only viable tri-feet are 001, 010, and 100. As noted above, these are just rotations of each other. In Morse code, used in old-fashioned telegraphy, the bi-feet are A and N, and the tri-feet are U, R, and D.  This has the, perhaps somewhat appropriate, acronym ANURD. One could also imagine 4-bit feet, such as the Beethoven V foot, 0001.

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