Enjambment

Examples

The start of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, with only lines 4 and 7 end-stopped: Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.}}

These lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed (meaning enjambment is used):

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:

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 punishèd.}}

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.

Endymion by John Keats, lines 2–4:

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us...}}

The song "One Night In Bangkok", from the musical Chess, written by Tim Rice and Björn Ulvaeus, includes examples such as :

Show with everything but Yul Brynner This grips me more than would a Muddy old river or reclining Buddha}}

Closely related to enjambment is the technique of "broken rhyme" or "split rhyme" which involves the splitting of an individual word, typically to allow a rhyme with one or more syllables of the split word. In English verse, broken rhyme is used almost exclusively 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":

ineers Wore orange brassieres.}}

The clapping game "Miss Susie" uses the break "... Hell / -o operator" to allude to the taboo word "Hell", then replaces it with the innocuous "Hello". Similarly, the Spanish-language song "La Camisa Negra" leads the listener to imagine an obscenity before the next verse completes the word more innocently.

Notes

References

References

1. {{cite LPD. 3
2. (2012-08-26). "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics". Princeton University Press.
3. Groves, Peter Lewis. "Run-on Line, Enjambment". The Literary Encyclopedia.
4. Gardner, Thomas. (2005). "Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry". Univ of Wisconsin Press.
5. Chris Baldick. (30 October 2008). "The Oxford dictionary of literary terms.". Oxford University Press.
6. (2020-12-22). "Enjambment - Definition and Examples of Enjambment".
7. "Enjambment".
8. Nims, John Frederick. (1981). "The Harper Anthology of Poetry". Harper & Row.
9. 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.Preminger 359
10. William R. Taylor, The Book of Psalms, The Interpreters' Bible, volume VI, 1955, Abingdon Press, Nashville, p. 169
11. Lederer, Richard. (2003). "A Man of my Words: Reflections on the English Language". Macmillan.
12. https://songlations.com/2008/08/29/la-camisa-negra_juanes/