As part of a spell to turn a tomato into a carriage, Roger Bacon chants these words:
Higgeldy-piggeldy
Saint Athanasius
Riffled through volumes
In unseemly haste;
Trying to find out if
(Hagiographically)
John of Jerusalem
Liked almond paste.
[The Face in the Frost, 121]
Egyptian national leader, statesman, and one of the chief defenders of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th Century (ca. 296-373).
Bellairs's verse is an example of double dactyl. Only those who have become bored with simpler forms such as the limerick would dare to try their hands at composing in this demanding medium whose rules are quite stringent, notes Myers. "The first line of the first stanza is almost invariably higgledy-piggledy (or some related variant), whose purpose is simply to establish the dactylic meter. The second line must be a six-syllable proper name which conforms to the triplet meter. The second line of the second stanza is required to be a single six-syllable word in the dactylic meter. Lastly, the last lines of the first and second stanzas must rhyme. If you think these are easy to write, just try to come up with one. The real difficulty is to come up with a fitting proper name for the first stanza, then finding something witty to say about it."
Myers feels Bellairs is at the top of his writing game at this point. "For him to come up with two excellent specimens in two pages is his equivalent of hitting back-to-back grand slam home runs. I believe John was introduced to the form by a 1965 article in Esquire Magazine on double dactyls. Esquire at the time was a much more handsome and prestigious magazine than it is today, and it called composing double dactyls an ideal way to waste time. Indeed it is! I was living in New York when the article appeared, and Bellairs must have breezed through on a visit to his publisher at about that time. I remember showing him the article and making a couple of feeble attempts on my own to compose examples. In fact, I even remember my favorite example from the Esquire article, which was so good that it even was able to dispense with the higgledy-piggledy:
What would you do if a
Marjorie Morningstar
Type of a girl
Were inclined to refuse?
I'd revert to the Vatican's
Pre-ecumenical
Council position
On guilt-ridden Jews!
"It's unlikely that Bellairs was ever exposed to double dactyls before the Esquire article; it's hard to imagine either Notre Dame's nor Chicago's august English departments wasting any course time on a verse form that started out with higgledy-piggledy, but you never know."
