A Study of Enjambments
In The Variorum Edition of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the editors draw on Susan Linville’s 1984 study of enjambment in those Sonnets to open some thoughts on the way enjambment works. His was an era of end-stopped lines even as our habits easily fall into a sense line construction, where we break at the end of a phrase. My wife, in fact, remembers being taught in school (that would be in the early ‘60s) that end-stopped lines were most natural, such that she questioned the use of enjambments as being a mark that the poet couldn’t quite do it right! Linville uses a 1942 study by Arnold Stein to note that the enjambments Donne uses, contrary to custom, “create greater flow from one line to the next” (all these quotes are from p.178 of the Variorum Edition). The result of “polysyllabic words” and disruptions from the basically iambic cadence propels the reading through from one line to another, breaking the sense of termination at the end of one line – or of one stanza. One further note Linville makes is that Donne uses these, for his day, unusual techniques against the backdrop of convention “to create tension and enrich meaning.”
I go about reading poems on DMR (and elsewhere, of course) and find a lot of concern expressed for the breaks. Naturally, this is a valid concern; breaks define the lines they end and begin and need to be something other than accidental – that is, it matters to the meaning of a poem where the breaks occur and how they are used together. I’ll see pieces of poems quoted in critiques with no sense that they come out of the flow of lines, but are simply an apt or appreciated phrase. I sometimes am left to wonder if we are prone to think line breaks are somewhat arbitrary and not of significance to the development of meaning in the poem. When we talk about breaks, so often it is about the word at the end of the leading line – and expressions detail the desire for a “strong” word there, usually a noun or a verb. But we don’t often talk about the enjambments and how the combination flows and creates emphasis and leaning, even energy in the poem as read.
Revisions arise in which the structure of lines, their breaks and enjambments (or lack of enjambments) are changed significantly; I’m not always sure I can figure out on what basis the changes were made. Sometimes major themes in the original are played down significantly in the revision while minor elements are thrown into sharper focus. Too often, it seems that the changes are wrought for lots of reasons that remain peripheral to the poem in question itself.
Donne’s use of convention suggests that a poem builds within itself its own convention, whether that borrows from classical forms or is more of an immediate invention. There is a sense of cadence, a flow that appears to be basic to the poem itself, upon which arises the use of disruptions in the rhythm or cadence, a break in the flow, an enjambment that drives the poem onward or a sequence of end-stopped lines that chop the flow into the equivalent of garden path stepping stones, taken one at a time with an enforced stop between them. Short words rattle out their cadence with abrupt accents and lively cadence whereas the slide into polysyllabic words alters that flow, mutes it somewhat and establishes a milieu for the graceful disruption of the flow of cadence, even as a part of the investment of enjambment possibilities (line to line, strophe to strophe) stretch open the poem in terms of exposing meaning and inventing emphasis and energy in the poem’s presence.
That these things are there is obvious. For the reader, they are most helpful in engaging the poems at hand. For the poet, they are thought about almost as an afterthought, more so than as a forethought. as something that is caught in the instinct of the composition as it forms in the interplay of mind and paper (or computer screen, if you must!) As we work with the poem between first conception and final acceptance in our own minds, realizing how the stuff we use works for us or against us helps us discover what it is we are writing.
by Bill Flewelling