Like the limerick, the double dactyl has a fixed structure, is usually humorous, and is rigid in its prosodic structure. The double dactyl's prosodic requirements are more strenuous due to its increased length, and its specific requirements as to subject matter and word choice much more rigid, making it significantly more difficult to write. There must be two stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylicdimeter followed by a lineconsisting of just a choriamb. The last lines of these two stanzas must rhyme. Further, the first line of the first stanza is repetitive nonsense, and the second line of the first stanza is the subject of the poem, which in the purest instances of the form is a double-dactylic proper noun. There is also a requirement for at least one line, preferably the second line of the second stanza, to be entirely one double dactyl word. Some purists still follow Hecht and Pascal's original rule that no single six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, should ever be knowingly used again. An example by John Hollander: Higgledy piggledy, Benjamin Harrison, Twenty-third president Was, and, as such, Served between Clevelands and Save for this trivial Idiosyncrasy, Didn't do much. A self-referential example by Roger L. Robison: Long-short-short, long-short-short Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs : One sentence Hexasyllabically Challenges poets who Don't have the time. The Dutch version, called after a children's verse, was introduced in the Dutch language by Drs. P. A similar verse form called a McWhirtle was invented in 1989 by American poetBruce Newling. Another related form is the double amphibrach, similar to the McWhirtle but with stricter rules more closely resembling the double dactyl.
In literature
The first published collection of double dactyls was Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander. Many of the poems had previously appeared in Esquire starting in 1966.
John Bellairs' classic fantasy novelThe Face in the Frost contains several double dactyls, used as nonsense magic spells.
The first published collection of double dactyls by a single author was Centicore Poems, I; being, A Non-canonical Collection of Entirely Prejudiced Double Dactyls "perpetrated by Jay Dillon", OCLC no. 498258515. Only one copy of this book is known to survive, in the British Library, General Reference Collection shelfmark X.902/1639.
Abbreviated Lays is a 2003 collection of double dactyl poetry about Roman history.
