In Cervantes’ Coloquio de los perros (published 1613), a dog recounts all the colorful characters he’s met in his life. One is this frustrated poet:

“I have strictly observed the rule laid down by Horace in his Poetica not to bring to light any work until ten years after it has been composed. Now I have a work on which I was engaged for twenty years, and which has lain by me for twelve […] a lofty, sonorous, heroic poem, delectable and full of matter; and yet I cannot find a prince to whom I may dedicate it.”

“What is the subject of the work?” inquired the alchemist.

“It treats,” said the poet, “of that part of the history of King Arthur of England which Archbishop Turpin left unwritten, together with the history of the quest of the Holy Grail; and all in heroic verse, part in rhymes and part in blank verse; but entirely dactylically—I mean in dactylic noun substantives, without admitting any verb whatsoever.”

I was struck by this conceit: a poem all in nouns, with no verbs at all? Naïvely, it reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in whose “conjectural Ursprache”

there are no nouns […] there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to “luna,” but there is a verb which in Spanish would be “lunecer” or “lunar.” In […] the northern hemisphere the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “luna,” but rather “aéreo-claro sobre oscuro-redondo” […]

Did Cervantes have the same kind of idea 350 years earlier? (Spoiler alert: No. We’ll get to what he actually meant in part 2 of this series. But it does strike me as plausible that Borges might have gotten his idea from what Cervantes wrote.)

Over on Literature StackExchange, Peter Shor pointed out that in the 20th century, Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams did in fact produce verbless or almost-verbless poems, albeit short ones. Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) is verbless:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Half a century earlier, here’s Afanasy Fet’s verbless “Шепот” (“Whispers”; 1850), with an equally verbless English translation by Boris Dralyuk:

But in neither case is the poem composed entirely of nouns; it merely eschews verbs. And even if it were all nouns, those nouns wouldn’t be solely dactyls! Dactyls are the things you have two of in each line of a double dactyl. Intriguingly enough, if you had to pick a subject for a poem composed entirely of dactyls, you could do much worse than Arthurian romance. Almost all their proper nouns are dactyls — Camelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Avalon — and almost all their abstractions — piety, chastity, gallantry, bravery.

Chivalry-errantry,
Arthur of Camelot
Heard from Sir Lancelot
News of the Grail.
First tapped was Perceval,
But it was Lancelot’s
Superimmaculate
Son who’d prevail.

Glapisant-glatisant,
Pellinore’s Questing Beast
Made in its belly a
Noise like ten hounds.
So it’s ironic the
Actual animal
Camelopardalus
Doesn’t make sounds.

Anyway, inspired by Cervantes’ poet, the other week I went and wrote a hundred-line poem (loosely speaking) on the quest of the Holy Grail, entirely in words that are both dactyls and nouns. It is, obviously, not a masterpiece. I could sit on it for nine years, as Horace advises… but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I’ll sit on my poem for another nine days or so, hoping that some gentle reader might take up the idea from this post and create something of their own, too.

This will also give me plenty of time to post part 2, in which I’ll explain what Cervantes’ poet actually meant by “todo esdrújulamente, digo en esdrújulos de nombres sustantivos, sin admitir verbo alguno.”