One more Dactyl (and Remembering the Nordstrom Girls)

It just struck me that this dactyl-hymnal thing might be more prevalent than I had realized (link). Now I am remembering what was, for me, the funniest amateur vaudeville act I ever enjoyed. That would be:

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:

Yep, that would be "Whispering Hope, (link), the work of one Septimus Winner who gave us also such winners as “Listen to the Mockingbird,” and “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” But you just don’t know what comedy is unless you heard "Whispering Hope" as rendered on home theatricals night in the 1940s by my mother, Esther Nordstrom, and her sister, Louise Nordstrom.

I guess you had to have been there and sadly, this was the day before tape recorders, but I can still picture them—both short, Esther roundish and Louise a bit spidery, arm and arm they’d enter; they’d bow in unison. Then totally deapan, in close harmony:

SOFT

As the voice of an a-a-ngel,

BREATH

Ing a lesson unheard

And so forth through –well, I don’t know how many verses, I was laughing too hard and so, I assume was everybody else in reach. They’d bow again, still unsmiling and exit as they entered. Like I say you had to have been there. But I also say: Esther’s been dead for over 20 years now—Louise, longer. There are many reasons to wish them with us again, but I can think of none more compelling than the desire once again to hear them do their rendition of “Whispering Hope.”

Church Music Footnote: Only remotely relevant, Mrs. Buce asks: is “Ave Maria” really the most god-awful piece of music Schubert ever wrote, or is it just that it is so consistently sung god-awfully by god-awful singers? Or maybe they are joking and we don’t get it.

Update: My sister Sally and my cousin David independently remind me that there was a third Nordstrom sister in the act: our aunt Selma. I never saw that version, but I can believe it: Selma, the youngest of the three (and the only one who never married), shared her sister's comic sensibility, although she was perhaps a bit gentler. Sally also points out that they all three had absolutely knockdown perfect pitch which, in this case, was part of the comedy.

I'm Thinking of a Dactyl

I’m thinking of a dactyl (DAH duh duh). At least I thought it was a dactyl, but on second thought, I am not so sure. It’s the beginning of an old Protestant hymn, parked in my brain these last few days:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.

(On which, see link).

My first thought was: SOFT ly and TEN der ly—hm, dactyls. It’s worthy of note, because dactyls aren’t supposed to work in English. They work fine in Greek, as at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey:

Andra moi ennepe Mousa, polytropon hos mala polla

Tell me, muse, of the man of many wiles…

And even more famously in Latin, as at the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid:

Armo virumque cano…

Arms and the man I sing…

But in English, you tend to wind up with a Sousa march:

(When) I see the Stars and the Stripes,
Then my heart is a drum wildly beating…

Or worse, just about every limerick you ever learned:

(There) once was a lady from Natchez
(Whose) clothes were all covered with patchez

Duh da duh duh da
Duh da duh duh da

(She) said—“When ah itchez, ah scratchez!”

[Ever notice how hard it is to remember the couplet in most limericks?]

But in fact, there are more dactyls in English than you might guess. Here is the American Sidney Lanier, blogged here some months ago (link):

Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

[But it seems that English does seem to require that short “leading syllable,” unknown to Greek and Latin epic.]

An underappreciated English (American) example is Longfellow’s Evangeline (link):

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

But maybe the most dramatic example is Lord Byron, in the beginning of The Bride of Abydos:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

[The first line is apparently a riff on the first line of Goethe’s Mignon, almost the only line of German poetry I know:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn…]

But back to “softly and tenderly.” Is it a dactyl? Is it? It sure sounds like a dactyl—but wait, on second look, you realize that what you have here is a waltz (one-two-three, one-two-three). Can a waltz be a dactyl? Must we picture the preacher sweeping the organist across the floor?

The same goes at the other end of the line. Conventionally, dactylic lines end with a spondee (or at any rate, they do in classical epic): DAH duh duh DAH DAH. Spondees have a way of adding solidity, assurance. So correspondingly, I heard it:

SOFT ly and TEN der ly JES us is CALLING

[I apologize for the shouting orthography: I understand that Jesus calls more firmly in voice than he does in capital letters.]

But wait—this can’t be a spondee, even less than the first syllable is a dactyl. Again, we get firm, steady beats—but three beats. Can there be a three-note spondee? Certainly my sixth-grade teacher never told me about it, and I suspect she did not know if there can.

Curious footnote: “Dactyl” is not a “dactyl.” “Anapest” (duh duh DAH) is a dactyl (DAH duh duh). But “dactyl” is a trochee (DAH duh). As is “iamb,” and, come to that, as is “trochee.” As in (link):

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big Sea-Water

That’s Longfellow. A certain George C. Strong, otherwise unknown to me, nailed it to the wall (link):

   
He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside. … 

Poor Longfellow would have done well to stick to dactyls.

Final footnote: “spondee” does seem to be a spondee.