Enjambment

Enjambment occurs when a syntactic unit, whether a sentence, clause, or phrase, does not end at the line break but continues into the next line. The word derives from the French enjamber, meaning "to stride over" or "to encroach," and that physical metaphor captures the effect precisely: the sense of the poem strides over the line ending, pulling the reader forward with an urgency that a line-end pause would arrest. Enjambment stands in contrast to end-stopped lines, where the syntactic unit and the line ending coincide. The interplay between enjambed and end-stopped lines is one of the primary tools a poet uses to control rhythm, pacing, and emphasis.

William Wordsworth uses enjambment masterfully in Tintern Abbey, where long sentences flow across line boundaries to create a meditative, continuous movement that mirrors the poem's exploration of memory and landscape. John Milton's Paradise Lost depends heavily on enjambment; his sentences routinely span multiple lines of blank verse, creating a grand, oratorical sweep that would be impossible with end-stopped lines. In contemporary poetry, poets like Jorie Graham use extreme enjambment, sometimes breaking lines in the middle of a word or between an article and its noun, to slow the reader down and make the act of reading itself part of the poem's subject.

To use enjambment effectively, consider what the line break does to the words on either side of it. The last word of a line and the first word of the next line both receive heightened emphasis due to their positions. A skilled enjambment exploits this: breaking after "I could not" and beginning the next line with "stop" places weight on the inability and the action simultaneously. When revising, read each line as if it were a complete unit and notice what meanings emerge from the fragment before the reader's eye moves to the next line. These momentary, phantom meanings created by enjambment add richness and ambiguity. Use enjambment to create momentum in passages that should feel urgent, and use end-stopped lines to create stillness and finality where the poem demands it.