[Critique Group 1] enjambment

[Marcia Wick]

What is enjambment? Here's a quick and simple definition:

Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause across a line break.
For example, the poet John Donne uses enjambment in his poem "The
Good-Morrow" when he continues the opening sentence across the line break
between the first and second lines: "I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
/ Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?"

Some additional key details about enjambment:

*	The opposite of an enjambed line of poetry is an end-stopped
<https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/end-stopped-line>
line: a sentence or clause whose end does fall at the end of a line of
poetry.
*	Enjambment has the effect of encouraging the reader to continue
reading from one line to the next, since most of the time a line of poetry
that's enjambed won't make complete sense until the reader finishes the
clause or sentence on the following line or lines.
*	Poets often use enjambment to introduce ambiguity or contradiction
into an otherwise straightforward sentence: the incomplete clause might
suggest something that the following line(s) reject. This is often true in
poetry written since the end of the 18th century.

 


Enjambment Examples


Shakespeare's "Sonnet 116"


Four of the first eight lines of this sonnet by Shakespeare are enjambed.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

 

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