Then there is the fourth sentence: "Footprint on foot / Print, word on word and each on a fool's errand." The position of the first "footprint" calls for a heavier stress on "print" to accommodate the iambic pentameter, but the
enjambment then puts the heavy end-line beat on "foot" followed in the next line by the common trochaic inversion of the initial foot laying stress on "Print." The semantic result is significant, "foot" suddenly calling forth the metrical foot of verse, primarily aural, and "Print" shifting to the printed page from which we are reading, the visual medium of the poet's rhythmic beat.
As the translation formed, the effect of the
enjambment was lost.
Line breaks and
enjambment make vivid the kind of unmitigated pain
In the fairy tale that sets you free It's pickup truck month in Texas Brown rarely capitalizes every line; here it lends the poem a quality of calm reserve, accentuating its end-stopped lines, so unlike the rough
enjambments of the Vietnam poems.
(1) Those containing NO
ENJAMBMENT (0E), in which the end of a line coincides with the end of a sentence:
The quality of this poem's music is also achieved byKomunyakaa's masterful use of
enjambment. If we remember, theterm "
enjambment" is directly borrowed from the French"enjamber" which literally means "to straddle orbestride" or "crossing over." In this poem,enjambment is where the surprise lives!
29-37, seeking to show how patterns of stress,
enjambment, and verse paragraphing help create the unusual sense of authority he detects in this passage.
A parking -lot seagull blown up -river and the French fry wrapper it chokes down And this world continues to suffocate: "Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?" Harmon's shifts between poetry and prose are ways of breathing through these retractions: his deft use of
enjambment contrasts with his eventual willingness to allow punctuation, rather than line breaks, to dictate rhythm:
What defines poetry, according to Agamben and others, is the possibility of
enjambment. Rather than merely dealing with parenthetical insertions interrupting and distracting the reader from the meaning produced by sentences, one must take into account the prior distribution of these sentences over multiple verses.
She describes the Irish poet's use of
enjambment as resembling "a jump cut in film," and adds that McGuckian's work has led to some of the "more cinematic qualities" of her own poetry.
Thus, the essence of poetry for Agamben is
enjambment, the negative space that separates otherwise continuous communicative units.
The other affordance of the Spenserian stanza is, of course, its strong closure: the terminal alexandrine decisively ends the unit--so decisively, indeed, that there is essentially no
enjambment across stanzas anywhere in The faerie queene.