Enjambment

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Enjambment (also spelled "enjambement") is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line. The term is directly borrowed from the French enjambement, meaning "encroachment".

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 from line to line, and the reader’s eye is pulled forward. Enjambment creates a feeling of acceleration, as the reader is forced to continue reading after the line has ended. 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 and 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.

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)

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.

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