[Bards] Poetic Exercise #5

[Ulf Gunnarsson]

We have played with the iambic foot.  Now it is time to let the other
shoe drop and play with the trochaic foot.  The trochaic foot is the
opposite of the iambic.  It is a pair of syllables, the first being
stressed and the second being unstressed.  For example:

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,..."

Do you hear the beats in that?

As with most of these, double unstressed syllables usually count as one
because they run together when spoken, such as "-ony" in a later line
from the same poem: "Then this ebony bird beguiling..."

This form is common in Norse and Old English verse, but started to
disappear in favor of iambic about the time we started getting all those
French words mixed into the language.  As the example above illustrates,
it was never entirely eradicated, and certainly makes a good marching or
rowing beat in poetry.  Of course, Vikings in the SCA favor it, though
the Greeks us it once in a while too.

Another thing once common was the riddle.  Riddle games were as
respected as chess tournaments, and riddles were often set in verse.

So... Write a riddle using nothing but trochaic feet.  You can end the
riddle with a non-metrical question, frequently of the formula "What am
I?".  It does *not* have to be a hard riddle.

If you *really* cannot come up with a riddle, then try some trochaic
verses decrying riddling games.  But try the riddles first, as it can be
fun to make one.

My contribution is:

In the South I can lift a vessel.
In the North I can break a vessel.
Many arms and many fingers
But no hands between them.
What am I?

Ulf