Dactyl (poetry)
A dactyl is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, often used in English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest.
An example of dactylic meter is the first line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline, which is in dactylic hexameter:
The first five feet of the line are dactyls; the sixth a trochee.
Stephen Fry quotes Robert Browning's The Lost Leader as an example of the use of dactylic metre to great effect, creating verse with "great rhythmic dash and drive":
The first three feet in both lines are dactyls.
Another example: the opening lines of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", his poem about the birth of his poetic voice:
The dactyl "out of the..." becomes a pulse that rides through the entire poem, often generating the beginning of each new line, even though the poem as a whole, as is typical for Whitman, is extremely varied and "free" in its use of metrical feet.
Dactyls are the metrical foot of Greek and Latin elegiac poetry, which followed a line of dactylic hexameter with dactylic pentameter.
In Joyce's Ulysses opening chapter Buck Mulligan quips that his own name is a dactyl. Mull-i-gan.
