Previously: “A poem all in dactylic noun substantives, part 1” (2025-08-28). Cervantes wrote satirically of a poet who had written—

“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.”

Over on Literature StackExchange, Clara Díaz Sánchez explains that in the late 16th and early 17th century, there was in fact a fad for poetry in which many lines ended in dactyls.

We can taxonomize lines of poetry by where their last stress falls: it could fall on the last syllable of the line (verso agudo, or oxytone), on the penultimate (verso llano, or paroxytone), or on the antepenultimate (verso esdrújulo, or proparoxytone).

Note that when we call a word “an esdrújulo” we mean only that it ends in a dactyl, being suitable to end a proparoxytone line. The three-syllable word árboles is both an esdrújulo and a dactyl in the English sense, whereas the four-syllable word altíssima is an esdrújulo but not what I would call a dactyl. (I mean, it ends in a dactyl; but it has an extra syllable on the front.)

John T. Reid’s “Notes on the history of the verso esdrújulo” (Hispanic Review 7:4, 1939) is a fantastic overview of the topic. Reid gives several examples, and footnotes pointing to many more. (Most notably he points to a hundred pages of “curious notes” in Elías Zerolo’s Legajo de varios (1897) which I have thus far been too lazy to read.)

Esdrújulo line-endings rarely occur in typical Spanish poetry, not least because esdrújulos are rare in Spanish to begin with. But dactyls are common in Latin poetry (for example, in Virgil’s hexameter), so during the Renaissance they started appearing in learned Italian poetry imitating the Latin idiom, and then in learned Spanish poetry imitating the Italian fad. Verso esdrújulo became the mark of the erudite and faddish Spanish poet who “praises in enthusiastic tone / All centuries but this and every country but his own.” Take (please!) the esdrujulista subject of Zerolo’s notes,

[…] Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa, a poet from the Canary Islands who was considered the inventor of the verso esdrújulo. It will not be necessary here to review this second-rate author’s appalling production,

but I’ll give a sample. In his Templo Militante (1618), Cairasco de Figueroa wrote a hagiography of Pope Damasus I that reads, in part, as follows. I’m certainly no expert in 17th-century Spanish tastes, but by modern standards I’m going to call this bad poetry! The occasional short (“quebrado”) lines, frequent exact rhymes (benemérito / mérito, lícito / solícito), and flurry of line-initial “And”s give it much the same flavor as William McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (1880).

Ofrécese un varón, que en el pretérito Tiempo nació en Madrid, ya Corte amplífica, Y ahora solitaria, aunque pulquérrima, Y por ser celebérrima La pluma deste Santo benemérito, Y de alta fama y mérito En el metrificar, fué acuerdo lícito Del Senado solícito Que la Santa Poesía, en voz orgánica Por la región Ispánica, De Sant Dámaso cante en ella artífice Que fué del orbe máximo Pontífice.

Behold a man who was born in historical Times in Madrid, which was then a large capital, And now is abandoned, although most beautified, And as the pen of this worthiest Saint has such merit and eminence In rhyme and meter, it was thought suitable By our solicitous Senators That the sacred poetry, in the vox populi Of the Iberian continent, Of Saint Damasus be sung, whose architect Was of earth pontifex maximus. (trans. Arthur O'Dwyer, 2025)

Verso esdrújulo was the target of burlesques, such as Agustín de Salazar y Torres’ “Baile de los muchachos de la escuela” (c. 1680), which Reid quotes:

—Bien venido, amigo Alónsigo. —Señor Beltrán, bien llegádigo. ¿Cómo, amigo, hacia la escuéliga, has venido tan tempránigo?

—Welcome, Alonso my frienigand. —Señor Beltrán, good morniging. How is it, friend, you've comigome so early this morning to schooligool?

The joke here is that the words are just normal Spanish (Alonso, llegado, escuela, temprano) gussied up with an extra nonsense syllable so as to resemble erudite esdrújulos.

Now, as to the types of words you’d tend to find in a verso esdrújulo, Reid writes:

The question of rime has caused the esdrujulistas some difficulty. Montemayor’s early attempts had followed the Italian custom and the line of least resistance by confining his rimes almost exclusively to gerunds with enclitic pronouns, superlatives, and past tenses of verbs.⁠^[1] The task of finding rimes was thus made comparatively easy. But the repetition of such forms, as Rengifo remarked,^[2] was tiresome. Moreover, they were too obvious for an esdrujulista who prided himself on his art. Cervantes, in El casamiento engañoso, tells of a harebrained poet who composes an epic “todo en verso heroico, parte en octavas y parte en verso suelto; pero todo esdruxulamente, digo en esdruxulos de nombres sustantivos, sin admitir verbo alguno."^[3]

[1] — Montemayor’s Diana (1559) contains tercets like these: the first using gerund verbs with enclitic pronouns (mirándote “regarding you”), the second using infinitive verbs with enclitic pronouns (acercárseme “be approaching me”), and the third using past-imperfect-tense verbs (apercebíamos “we would prepare”). I’m not 100% sure what Reid (1939) meant by “past tenses of verbs,” but my guess is that he meant things like apercebíamos.

Sireno, en qué pensabas, que mirándote estaba desde el soto, y condoliéndome de ver con el dolor qu'estás quejándote? [...] La vida a mi pesar veo alargárseme, mi triste corazón no hay consolármele, y un desusado mal veo acercárseme. [...] Después la flecha y arco apercebíamos y otras veces la red, y ella siguiéndome jamás sin caza a nuestra aldea volvíamos.

Sireno, what were you thinking, when I saw you from that grove and sympathized with the pains you were complaining of? [...] I see life lengthening my sorrow, my sad heart cannot console me, and I see a worn-out grief approaching me. [...] Afterward we'd get our bows and arrows, other times a net, she following me; we never returned to the village without game. (trans. RoseAnna M. Mueller, 1977)

[2] — Juan Díaz Rengifo in Arte poetica española (1606) classifies esdrújulos into “verbs,” “superlatives,” and “substantives” (into which category he lumps both nouns, such as árboles, céspedes, and adjectives, such as estética, política).

Consonante esdrúxulo es un vocablo que tiene semejanza a otro desde la vocal antepenultima en que se pone el acento hasta la ultima letra; como poético, prophético. Hay tres maneras de Esdrúxulos: unos son Verbales, otros Superlativos, otros Sustantivos y Adjetivos.

El Esdrúxulo Verbal se hace cuando a alguna persona del verbo se le añade una destas particulas me, te, se, le, lo, los, vos, os, &c. y queda con el acento en la antepenultima, como matárate, dijístelo. […]

Finalmente en las personas de los verbos que tienen el acento en la ultima, se pueden fundar Esdrújulos añadiendoles dos particulas, como matómele, perdítele, hurtómelos, perdítelos, &c. […]

Todos los nombres Superlativos acabados en issimo son Consonantes entre si, como sapientissimo, amantissimo; de estos hay innumerables, y aunque enfadarían, y harían la copla muy afectada si usase uno siempre dellos, pero engeridos de cuando en cuando entre los demas tienen particular gracia.

[3] — So Cervantes’ “harebrained poet” isn’t actually talking about a poem consisting entirely of dactyls nor entirely of nouns; instead he’s talking about an ordinary verso esdrújulo using ordinary vocabulary within the line, but where each line ends with an esdrújulo and where none of the esdrújulo words “cheat,” Montemayor-style, by extending Spanish verbs with enclitic pronouns. He forbids himself to use rhymes like quejándote, alargárseme, volvíamos. Each rhyme must be one of the less flexible “substantives” — a noun or perhaps an adjective, never a verb (and presumably never a “cheating” superlative like altíssima, either).

So that’s not nearly as constrained as I’d pictured in my head — my reference point of Borges’ Tlönian language was way off base.

Reid (1939) concludes:

From its serious and possibly religious origins in Spanish verse [the verso esdrújulo] had become by the end of the nineteenth century a poetaster’s folly at the worst, or a light and festive medium at the best. […] The two moments in Spanish literary history when the verso esdrújulo was accepted solemnly — the Renaissance and the Romantic period — were ages when foreign influence had made pedantic affectation more or less the mode. But in each case the mode was conquered, or at least assimilated, by earthy, satirical laughter.

Bear in mind that Cervantes was absolutely “inside baseball” on this stuff — so he was satirizing something he considered ridiculous, regardless of how it might have been viewed by the public or by the poets who wrote it. If I understand correctly, the joke is that the poet’s self-imposed task is what we’d call “putting lipstick on a pig” or “polishing a turd.” A very rough analogy might be how a lot of limericks start with “There once was a…” So our poet boasts that he is retelling the Matter of Britain as a series of limericks, without ever using that hackneyed phrase. Adding constraints doesn’t change the fact that you’re writing a faintly ridiculous genre of poetry to begin with. At the end of the day, it’s still limericks.