{amateur.poetry} blurred

Do words such as dactylic or iambic ring a bell for you? How about dactylic hexameter or iambic pentameter?

Well, from what I have minimally learned, a dactyl (Greek for finger) in poetry is a metrical foot that sounds like DUM-di-dy, a long syllable followed by two short syllables. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting in a short syllable followed by a long one such as duh-DUH. I guess short and long syllables are not literally sound, so, one may use unstressed and stressed instead of short and long, respectively.

An iambic pentameter consists in five imabs:
duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH

Iambic pentameter is one of the most commonly used measures in English and German poetry. For example, a sonnet has fourteen lines and each must be written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme pattern is ABABCDCDEFEFGG.

An elegiac couplet has two lines written in dactylic hexameter, with the second line having only an unaccented (unstressed, short) syllable in the third and sixth feet.

The blurred meanings of these words are getting more clear.

Sources: Poetry for Dummies, dactyl on Wikipedia, iamb on Wikipedia

{art.poetry}

I came across this poem and liked the humor. I am sharing it with you:

Genius by Mark Twain

Genius, like gold and precious stones,
is chiefly prized because of its rarity.

Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild,
incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility,
and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter.

Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth.

It is probably on account of this
that people who have genius
do not pay their board, as a general thing.

Geniuses are very singular.

If you see a young man who has frowsy hair
and distraught look, and affects eccentricity in dress,
you may set him down for a genius.

If he sings about the degeneracy of a world
which courts vulgar opulence
and neglects brains,
he is undoubtedly a genius.

If he is too proud to accept assistance,
and spurns it with a lordly air
at the very same time
that he knows he can't make a living to save his life,
he is most certainly a genius.

If he hangs on and sticks to poetry,
notwithstanding sawing wood comes handier to him,
he is a true genius.

If he throws away every opportunity in life
and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends
and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot,
and finally persists,
in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense
but not any genius,
persists in going up some infamous back alley
dying in rags and dirt,
he is beyond all question a genius.

But above all things,
to deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse
and then rush off and get booming drunk,
is the surest of all the different signs
of genius.