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The enjambment is a rite of passage. It’s not the poetic tool that a beginning poet first utilizes. If you’re seized with a passion to share your innermost feelings with the world, you’re not likely to stop in the middle of a feeling, Those feelings are too important – they have to be stated with the utmost clarity, so that everyone will get what you’re saying. Young children’s poetry is pretty much free of enjambments. If you’ve noticed that the clouds look like little white sheep, or that Mom always cooks pancakes when I feel bad, you’ll have a clear enough sense of communication and relationship to know that you should put the clouds and the sheep, or the more complex matter of mom and the pancakes and my feelings, together in the same sentence, which means on the same line. Besides, you’re just learning about how to write a complete sentence, and that’s structural breakthrough enough. Auden said that a poet was someone who liked to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another, and those who start eavesdropping on the secret language of words will soon discover that words are mischievous little devils who love to play tricks on one another, and one of their favorite games is hide and seek – a word that knows perfectly well that it belongs in the middle of a sentence suddenly finds itself at the end of a line…and where’s its buddy? Nowhere to be found. It’s all alone, like that dream in which you suddenly find yourself naked in public. And your fledgling poet, who’s had that dream, or maybe even found themself naked in public, suddenly discovers that hey, this is something words can do! And then suddenly realizes, consciously or not, Hey, now I’m thinking like a poet! First experiments with enjambment may be tentative – I know this is what poets do, so I’m going to do it to show that I’m a poet. Like Maria Shriver, choosing poetry to share her innermost feelings with all those who’ve admired her as a TV personality, or a member of the Kennedy family, or first lady of California: I never imagined writing poetry would help me embark Baby steps. Enjambments in safe places, doing safe jobs. Help me embark – where, Maria, where? … never imagined that everything I sought or thought I needed – yes, Maria? What did you discover about everything? It’s easy to mock, and I don’t mean to. This is a starting point – using enjambments tentatively. They let the world know you’re writing a poem, and after all, this is what we all do, though we may not admit it. We use these devices so that the reader will be sure that this is a poem that we’re writing. And what do enjambments look like, sound like, feel like, when they’re not tentative at all? What are reckless enjambments, and who uses them? Gerard Manley Hopkins, for one: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Hopkins is throwing words around so recklessly, leaping from a safe alliteration (“grandeur of God”) that could be in any small town sermon to a wild one (“shining from shook”) embedded in another wild one (“flame…foil”), and just when we’re getting used to the pattern of alliteration, with “gathers” and “greatness” in the next line, he hits us with a really weird one – “ooze of oil” – which also ends in an enjambment. There’s a good chance we’re already a little confused. What is ooze of oil and what does it have to do with that shining that got shaken from foil? We have to wait for the next line for clarification, just as we did with Maria Shriver. Of course, with Maria we got instant, if unsurprising, clarification—she was embarking on a journey deep into herself. With Hopkins, no such luck. But, as it becomes more and more apparent, he isn’t trying to clarify things for us, he’s trying to overwhelm us. Of course he is. He’s talking about the grandeur of God, which may be so real that it’s in God’s soil, but you’ve got shoes on and you’re not going to feel it. Reckless enjambment. What else can we do with an enjambment? Donald Justice begins a poem with this one: Men at forty which is enjambment enough – it’s a break between a subject and its verb – but such a natural pause that it scarcely feels like one. And the next line, Learn to close softly fits so nicely with it – another two-stress line, ending with a half rhyme – but it ends a little less neatly. It’s not quite as safe an enjambment because we now have a subject and a verb, making a complete sentence, and sentence certainly can end with an adverb – “Jim finished the job quickly.” But this one doesn’t seem to. The thought feels still incomplete, and there’s no punctuation mark at the end of it. A slightly less safe enjambment, leading to the doors to rooms they will not be -- a much longer line, and one ending with a cliffhanger of an enjambment, stopping right in the middle of a verb phrase. And having pushed his sequence of enjambments from safe to cliffhanger, Justice can end the sentence, and the stanza: Coming back to. Karen Alkalay-Gut also uses a whole string of enjambed lines. This is from her powerful book-length sequence, Survivors, poems about, and in the voices of, Holocaust survivors, those in her family and those she grew up with. There was nothing she could tell me Why all those breaks in mid-thought? The story, with its homely details of a house, a marketplace, chickens, and then the more powerful image of the synagogue next door– but they’re all powerful, pulled from her mother’s memory, and the line breaks help the story. Each enjambment is an enjambment of pain, all the mother can bear at one time, before she has to steel herself and go on. This is T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative pushed one step farther – emotion evoked not only through the objects in the poem but through its structure. And what does Shakespeare have to say about all this? Well, here’s what one of his greatest contemporary mouthpieces, Dame Judi Dench, has to in a recent book, The Man Who Pays the Rent, a collection of her reminiscences and observations on productions that paid the rent for her over the years. LADY MACBETH And when goes hence? MACBETH Tomorrow, as he purposes. LADY MACBETH O never It’s an orchestral score, isn’t it? Shakespeare tells you how to act it. Lady Macbeth completes the shared line, which shows her mind racing. And after ‘Shall sun that morrow see’ there should be a pause because it’s not a full iambic pentameter, which means you’re allowed some kind of a reaction. Peter [Hall] taught me that and it opened a huge door for me. In that pause, I think she’s gauging what Macbeth is thinking. She sees that his mind has gone exactly where her mind has gone. She discerns naked ambition in his face, Shakespeare was above all a dramatist, writing lines of dialog for actors to speak, but he wrote it in verse, in iambic pentameter, and as Dame Judi points out, that’s an aid, not an impediment, to the actor. Lady MacBeth answers her husband in the same pentameter line that he begins, showing that she virtually cuts him off – there’s no pause between his thought and hers. Then, as she points out, the next line is truncated – unusual for Shakespeare – indicating to the actor playing the role that there should be a pause for a reaction, from the audience and from Macbeth. But in between, there’s an enjambment. And that’s no accident either. “Never” is Lady MacBeth’s immediate response – the one for which she won’t even let her husband get to the end of his pentameter line. And even if the actor doesn’t pause in saying the line, the cadence of the pentameter creates an instinctive pause, so that the power of “Never” hangs in the air. Seems wrong to end this essay with an end-stop. But that’s the limitation of prose for you.
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