dactyl

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The finger: one long element followed by two short elements.

The dactylus ( ancient Greek δάκτυλος dáktylos , German 'finger' ; plural: dactyls; in metric formula notation there) Is in the Verslehre an existing of a long or short stressed and unstressed or two parts metrical foot . Dactylic meter measures, especially the hexameter as a verse of the Homeric epics Iliad and Odyssey , are the most important meter measures of ancient poetry, but dactylic verses are also widespread in modern poetry.

In the quantifying ancient verse doctrine, the dactylus consists of a length ( elementum longum , symbol -) and a double abbreviation ( elementum biceps , symbol ◡◡ ), in the metric scheme it is therefore notated with - ◡◡ . The elementum biceps can appear in many verses both with two short syllables (—◡◡, the actual dactylus) and with one long syllable (——, the dactylus realized as spondeus ); in both cases the dactylus extends over time four moras .

The origin of the word from the Greek name for finger indicates that the finger, like the foot of the verse, consists of one long and two short links. The word “dactyl” is itself a dactyl, i.e. autologous .

The metric opposite of the dactyl is the anapest ( ◡◡ -).

In the accent seal of modern languages, particularly in the German seal of Daktylus mostly by a will uplift (stressed syllable) and two cuts (unstressed syllables) is formed. Since the dactylus, like the trochee , is ascribed a falling rhythm, it is also referred to as a double faller according to a suggestion by Ivo Braak .

Ancient seal

Among the dactylic meter measures of antiquity and the ancient meter measures in general, the dominance of the dactylic hexameter as the epic verse is so strong that one usually speaks of hexameter. The same applies to the dactylic pentameter, actually not a five meter, but a meter consisting of six meters like the hexameter , actually a variant of the hexameter. Hexameter and pentameter together form the stanza form of the elegiac distich .

The most famous example of an ancient Greek verse, the first verse of the Iliad , is a hexameter:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
Menin aeide, thea, Peleïad (e) o Akhileos
Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus

The ancient dactylic meter measures at a glance:

  • Catalectic dactylic trimeter (there 3c), also known as (minor) Archilochian verse :
—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ—

See also: hemiepes

  • Dactylic tetrameter (there 4) also known as Alcmanic Verse or Alcmanicus :
- ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ — ◡◡
  • Dactylic pentameter (since 5):
- ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ— ‖ —◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ—
  • Dactylic hexameter (there 6):
- ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ— ◡◡ ˌ — ◡◡ˌ— ◠
For details, see the main article. As an example, only the first verse from the Roman national epic , the Aeneid of Virgil, corresponding to the beginning of the Iliad (translated into German by Wilhelm Hertzberg ):

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
I and he praised weapons, who first came from the shores of Troy

Also to be mentioned are the so-called dactyloepitritic verses , a group of verse forms which are composed of a combination of dactylic and epitritic feet and kola .

German poetry

Dactylic verses are found in medieval German poetry; after that, dactylic verses only reappeared in German poetry at the beginning of the 16th century, partly coming from humanistic tradition, partly inspired by dactylic verses in Italian choral songs , cantatas and opera arias .

middle Ages

It is assumed that the verse form referred to by Andreas Heusler as the Middle High German dactyl represents an independent development in German. A takeover from neo-Latin and Provencal poetry is considered less likely. The main representatives of the form, which appeared for the first time in the minnesang of the 12th century, are Emperor Heinrich , Friedrich von Hausen , Heinrich von Morungen and Ulrich von Lichtenstein . With the minnesong it disappears again towards the end of the 13th century.

The large number of dactyls in German that appear at the foot of a word was seen as promoting independent development . These arise, for example, automatically from the numerous two-syllable Trochaic root words by adding a suffix . For example, by adding the participle suffix "-de", the root word "silence" becomes the dactyl "(the) silent", from "cheerful" becomes "cheerful", from "brother-in-law" "sister-in-law", from "thousand" "thousandfold" etc. Likewise, a dactylic rhythm is very easily produced if unstressed functional words such as e.g. B. Articles are inserted or a word with a trochaic stem ("tasten") is preceded by an unstressed prefix ("be"). Example: " maid rig the BAEC ker be tas tet the arid kene Sem mel."

Modern times

The in baroque poetry especially by Martin Opitz represented alternation principle , which basically iambic and trochaic not permit verses corresponded to the Dactyl. But August Buchner , the contemporary and heir of Opitz, explicitly allowed it in his instructions on German poetry , which he wrote around 1630 . Encouraged by Buchner, Philipp von Zesen expresses astonishment:

"Now I am not a little surprised / that nobody subdues / elaborates on this type of verse / in which they awaken the ears no less grace with their fleeting amiability than anything else / if they are only properly identified and used at the right time."

In fact, the use of the dactyl remained the exception until 1748 when the first chants of Klopstock's verse epic The Messiah appeared, which was laid out as a work of equal rank alongside the great epic poems of antiquity such as the Iliad and the Odyssey and accordingly also used the epic hexameter as a meter. With the enormous popularity of the work of its time, the dactylic meter became popular and the heroic hexameter became the dominant epic meter for a long time. As an example of the beginning of about a hundred years after the Messiah caused Tale of secure man of Eduard Mörike :

Should I tell a fairy tale about the safe man, listen!
- Some say that the stone toad gave birth to him.
So a mighty rock in the mountains of the Black Forest is called,
stump and wide, full of warts, comparable to the ugly toad.
In it he lay and slept until the days of the flood.

Klopstock also paved the way for the distich, which consists of hexameter and pentameter, in German poetry; the distich was used for epigrams and other small forms , following the example of Goethe's and Schiller's Xenien . A self-referential epigram of Ludwig Feuerbach consisting of a single distichon :

Shortness has spice
Life is really short: But short, as the distich is short,
What eternal content conceals in the fleeting form.

The distich was also often used for elegiac texts, often of considerable length, especially Friedrich Hölderlin's elegies , including bread and wine (around 1800).

Another metric invention of Klopstock is the so-called wandering dactyl in his replicas of the sapphic stanza .

Similar to the ambivalences that arise when looking at iambic and trochaic verses, there are ambivalences between dactylic, anapaestic and amphibrachian interpretations if one allows meter measures with an upbeat . The syllable sequence

◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡

for example it can be measured in three different ways:

◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡ = Dactylic four-lifter with prelude
◡ — ˌ◡◡ — ˌ◡◡ — ˌ◡◡ — ˌ◡ = Anapesthetic four lifter (with shortened first foot)
◡ — ◡ˌ◡ — ◡ˌ◡ — ◡ˌ◡ — ◡ = Amphibrachian four-lifter

Which of these measurements is taken as a basis also depends on which rhythm is created by the linguistic realization of the meter, i.e. the meaningful units to be found in the verse. In the following three verses from Theodor Däubler's mighty verse epic The Northern Lights , which also contains many poems in upbeat dactylic meter, the first verse is dactylic, the second verse anapaestic and the third verse amphibrachy rhythm, so the verses should be measured in the respective meter become:

Ver | shoot dene | Gra ber and | After brooding | currency nen
In itself | and the masters - | ten death | the kiss - | te,
because a famous | he stand | at a time | Hy ä nen,

If a text contains mostly verses of one of these forms, it makes sense to measure it accordingly; Since this is often not the case, however, many metrics, including Wolfgang Kayser , plead for completely abandoning the distinction between dactylic / anapaestical / amphibrachy and generally calling verses with double indentations as dactylic.

Dactylic verses

In addition to the dactylic hexameters and dactylic pentameters already discussed, based on ancient models, dactylic verses of various lengths can be found in German poetry of the modern age; From the dactylic one-lifter to the dactylic eight-lifter, every number of lifts is represented, up to the 20th century the two-lifter and four-lifter predominate. In contrast to the inconsistent replicas of ancient verses, these verses are very often rhymed. Trochaes are occasionally mixed in, especially in longer dactylic verses.

The dactylic two lifter

—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡

The dactylic two-lifter occurs with a complete second foot ( akatalectic ) or with a second foot shortened by one or two unstressed syllables ( catalectic ); often these forms are used side by side in the same text. An example can be found in the choir of angels from Goethe's Faust :

Christ is risen!
Joy to the mortal,
whom the perishable,
creeping, hereditary
defects have turned over!

V1 and V5 are catalectic, V2, V3 and V4 are acatalectic dactylic two-lifters. Similar to the choir of the shepherds in August von Platen's Christmas Eve :


We
offer praise to the born, praise to the chosen company of
believers.

The dactylic four-lifter

—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡◡

Dactylic four-levers usually have a fourth foot shortened by one or two syllables; Verses with these two closings alternate in the poem. As an example, the first stanza of Josef Weinheber's Der Daktylus :

Passion brings the bowl to my mouth.
In a blessed hour, passion throws
the bouncing ball out of heaven for me .
As it hits the earth, Sendling from above,
I am raised to a richer existence,
praise the Creator and love the universe.

In the drama, too, there are occasionally dactylic four-lifters, for example in Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart (3rd act, 3rd act, 1st scene):

Have I got out of the dark prison,
Doesn't the sad tomb hold me anymore?
Let me
drink the free, heavenly air in full, thirsty gulps .

Dactylic stanzas

Stanzas made up of dactylic verses are much less common in German poetry than stanzas that consist of iambic or trochaic verses. Nevertheless, some dactylic stanzas have been used regularly, including, according to Horst Joachim Frank, the most common form of the cross-rhymed quatrain from catalectic dactylic three-headers:

—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡
—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ—
—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ — ◡
—◡◡ˌ — ◡◡ˌ—

This stanza was used almost exclusively in the 20th century. In 1918 she chose Hermann Scherchen for his translation of the workers' hymn Brothers, to the sun, to freedom ; Stefan George used them a few times, including for the voices of the cloud daughters . From this the fourth stanza:

You who are rough and steely
tear out of hand us the booklet:
And we forgive the tormentors
If you hit us fatally.

Gottfried Benn also liked to use this stanza, among other things in Mediterranean and in travel .

Deviations in the closure are possible; in August Schnezler's Scolie not only V2 and V4, but all four verses close with a stressed syllable. The second stanza:

What the enthusiasm speaks
gives it a genius:
flashes of heavenly light,
drops of divine wine.

In addition to such quatrains, which are often cross-rhymed, more extensive dactylic stanzas have also been formed; In Bleibet im Lande , Friedrich Rückert uses the structure of the seven-line Luther verse , which he fills with dactylic four-headers. The fourth stanza:

Do not move in anger,
leave in displeasure, Do not turn your back on home!
If the fatherland wants itself,
it should be able to win it, it really needs men for that.
Striving fermented from confusion
should clarity and order arise;
Stay and wait and work in peace.

Dactylic stanzas are also used in the hymn; A well-known example is Praise the Lord, the mighty King of Honor , the stanza of which consists of two dactylic five-headers, one dactylic two-headers, and two dactylic three-headers. Another example is the song of Mary, Beautifully Magnificent .

Occasionally, dactylic verses are combined with verses of other meters to form a stanza, for example in Friedrich Schiller's The Expectation . The first four verses:

Do I not hear the gate go?
Didn't the bolt snap?
No, it was the wind blowing
through these poplars.

Two dactylic three-lifters are followed by two trochaic four-lifters; the first two verses depict dactylically excited hope, the last two verses trochaic, cautious disappointment. Schiller follows a similar idea in the dignity of women , where the “female” stanzas have a dactylic-agitated, the “male” stanzas a trochaic-measured meter; the dactylic tail rhyme stanzas correspond to the stanza that Weinträger also uses in his The Dactylus presented above .

Stanzas mixed from purely dactylic and upbeat-dactylic verses were popular in the baroque era. The sixth stanza from Angelus Silesius ' Streuet mit Palmen ... (set to music by Franz Tunder ):

Drip, you heavens, and give us in the rain
the Lord of Justice, our ornament,
open yourself, earth, with renewed movement
and bring us the Savior of men!

Friedrich Schiller uses a two-part ten-line stanza in Dithyrambe ; In the third stanza, the first six verses have no prelude, while the last four begin with an unstressed syllable:

Give him the bowl! Just
pour the poet,
Hebe, one. Mesh his
eyes with heavenly rope,
That he should not look at the Styx, whom he hated,
One of our people think he is.
It rustles, it bubbles,
the heavenly spring,
the bosom becomes calm,
the eye becomes bright.

Dactylic poem forms

Apart from the elegiac distich, German poetry does not know of any poem forms that are based on dactylic verses; at best it is related to limerick . However, dactylic verse has occasionally been used for poem forms that usually use other verses; the best known example is the sonnet . As early as the 17th century, Andreas Gryphius wrote his sonnet midnight in dactylic octopus; In the 20th century Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his sonnets to Orpheus , of which over 20 have dactylic verses. As an example, the 26th sonnet of the first part, which uses five-part dactyls into which troches are occasionally mixed:

But you, divine one, you, until the end still Ertöner,
since the swarm of spurned maenads attacked him,
drowned their cries with order, you beautiful one,
your edifying game rose from the destructive ones.

There was none to destroy your head and lyre, no matter
how they wrestled and rested; and all the sharp
stones that they threw
at your heart became gentle on you and endowed with hearing.

Eventually they smashed you, driven by vengeance,
while your sound lingered in lions and rocks
and in the trees and birds. You still sing there now.

O you lost God! You infinite trace!
Only because the enmity distributed you tearingly last
, we are the hearing now and a mouth of nature.

Other seals

In the Anglo-Saxon world, dactylic verses were used by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ( Evangeline , Hexameter) and Robert Browning ( The Lost Leader , Tetrameter), among others . In English, however, they remained marginal and by far did not have the meaning of the German hexameter founded by Klopstock and the German distich poetry.

A poem form of the rather comical poetry is the Double Dactyl ("double dactyl") invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1951. These are poems made up of two quatrains from dactylic dipodiums (—◡◡ — ◡◡), the last verses being rhymed and catalectic with two syllables, thus corresponding to a chorus iamb (—◡◡—).

literature

Monographs and Articles
Lexicons

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ivo Braak: Poetics in Key Words. 8th edition Stuttgart 2001, p. 82.
  2. ↑ August Buchner: Instructions for German Poetry. Wittenberg 1665.
  3. ^ Philipp von Zesen: Complete Works. Vol. 9 German Helicon (1641). Arranged by Ulrich Maché. de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 1971, ISBN 3-11-003598-7 , p. 35.
  4. ^ Horst Joachim Frank: Handbook of German Strophic Forms, Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1980.
  5. ^ Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch: “When Klopstock England Defied”: Coleridge, Southey, and the German / English Hexameter. In: Comparative Literature Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 130–163.
  6. ↑ Anthony Hecht, John Hollander (Ed.): Jiggery-Pokery. A Compendium of Double Dactyls. Atheneum, New York 1967.