Using Enjambment in Poetry: A Short Overview
Enjambment is a poetic device wherein ideas and phrases continue from one line to the next. Rather than completing a thought neatly, line per line, you stretch them out. This can add double, triple, or competing meanings, and further add depth to the piece.
Uses:
Adding extra meanings. By enjambing certain lines, the poet can create multiple meanings from fewer lines of text, or even contradict themselves. In this way, enjambment is like a combo meal of metaphors and meaning. Take the second stanza of the example poem. Here, the first line’s abrupt end allows for two meanings. The obvious meaning is the one created by “Call,” in the next line. But by breaking the thought here, I also allude to the reality that family has been distilled into a small device.
Adding Form to a Theme. These next two uses are intertwined (enjambed?). Whenever a line ends before the completion of a thought, the poet creates meaning out of that negative space. In a way, the pause itself is a word, and can add meaning language cannot. Consider the underlined section. Here, conclusion never comes, and we are left without a resolution, complementing the stanza’s subjects of loss and grief. The form matches the content.
Make Rhythm apart of your theme. Lastly, enjambment is not just about adding meaning with or without words. Poetry and rhythm are always linked together, and enjambment adds its own type of rhythm. Because the thoughts spill over from one line to the next, there is rarely any rest. Things just keep happening. And before one knows it, one is at the end. Much like life.
Example:
Growing Down, Jacob C. Sadler
Memories
All that’s left a man
When the past becomes his trellis
Whose family is a phone
Call without an answer, messages
Drifting into storage, a father
Entombed in a voicemail epitaph
Making small talk to the
Memories
All that’s left a man
When the heart is bound in roots
Whose world is filled with
Ghosts of inside jokes no one can
See, now friendship sailed into the
Pages of lined out numbers and
Addresses for visiting their
Memories
All that’s left a man
When the mind has gone to seed
Whose deepest loves are those he lost
Whose nostalgia is a full bouquet
To share when the flowers cease
To grow in this garden of rosy time-
Lapsed days compost the new
Memories
All that’s left a man
Who reaped the fleeting Spring.
