Enjambment

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Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line. The term is directly borrowed from the French enjambement, meaning "straddling" or "bestriding". Enjambment is sometimes referred to as a "run-on line".

Background

In reading an ejambed line, the delay of meaning in an enjambed line creates a tension that is released when the word or phrase that completes the syntax (called the rejet) is encountered; the tension arises from the "mixed message" produced both by the pause of the line-end, and the suggestion to continue provided by the incomplete meaning. In spite of the apparent contradiction between rhyme, which heightens closure, and enjambment, which delays it, the technique is compatible with rhymed verse. Even in couplets, the closed or heroic couplet was a late development; older is the open couplet, where rhyme and enjambed lines co-exist.

Enjambment has a long history in poetry. Homer used the technique, and it is the norm for alliterative verse where rhyme is unknown. In the 32nd Psalm of the Hebrew Bible enjambment is unusually conspicuous. It was used extensively in England by Elizabethan poets for dramatic and narrative verses, before giving way to closed couplets. The example of John Milton in Paradise Lost laid the foundation for its subsequent use by the English Romantic poets; in its preface he identified it as a chief feature of his poetry: "sense variously drawn out from one verse [line] into another".

Use

Enjambment may also be used to delay the intention of the line until the following line so as to play on readers' expectations and surprise them. Alexander Pope uses this technique for humorous effect in the following lines from The Rape of the Lock:

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore

Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.

The 2nd line should confuse the reader, raising the question "Why would a Jew or infidel adore a cross?" On rereading, the reader should realize that "breast" does not carry the general androgynous connotation of "chest" but instead the specific idea of a woman's breasts, which are so attractive that a man of any religion would kiss the Christian cross to be near.

Enjambment may be used in light verse, such as to form a word that rhymes with "orange", as in this example by Willard Espy, in his poem "The Unrhymable Word: Orange":

The four eng-

ineers

Wore orange

brassieres.

Another usage is in alluding to taboo words, as in the clapping game "Miss Susie", which uses the break "... Hell / -o operator" to allude to the taboo word "Hell", then replaces it with the innocuous "hello".

Examples

Shakespeare

The following lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex

Commonly are; the want of which vain dew

Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have

That honourable grief lodged here which burns

Worse than tears drown.

Meaning flows as the lines progress, and the reader’s eye is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like “flow-of-thought” with a sensation of urgency or disorder.

In contrast, the following lines from Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) are completely end-stopped:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.

Each line is formally correspondent with a unit of thought — in this case, a clause of a sentence. End-stopping is more frequent in early Shakespeare: as his style developed, the proportion of enjambment in his plays increased. Scholars such as Goswin König and A.C. Bradley have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment.

E.E. Cummings

A master of enjambment, E.E. Cummings combined it with the use of punctuation as an art form:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

——————————————————— i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Catullus

For another example of enjambment in poetry, look at the opening lines of Catullus XIII, ad Fabullum:

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me

paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,

si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam

cenam, non sine candida puella

et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.

Here is an English translation, roughly preserving word order:

You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my house

in a few, if the gods favor you, days,

and if you bring with you a good and great

dinner, not without a white girl

and wine and wit and laughs for all.

The phrase si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam / cenam (“if you bring with you a good and great / dinner”) is sharply enjambed between the third and fourth lines.

References

• Preminger, Alex (1993). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. US: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02123-6. https://archive.org/details/newprincetonency00alex. 
• John Hollander, Vision and Resonance, Oxford U. Press, 1975 (especially chapter 5).
• Free online explanation with examples

See also

• Blank verse
• Caesura
• Concrete poetry
• End-stopping
• Free verse
• Line break (poetry)
• Meter (poetry)
• Poetic form
• Stanza
• Visual poetry