Monday, January 26, 2009

Enjambment vs End-Stopping

As Vendler argues in Chapter 4, a poem can have many overlapping or superimposed structures. For instance, the division of the poem into lines and stanzas might organize the poet's thoughts, images and rhythms in one way, but the poem's grammar (i.e. how its words are divided into clauses, phrases, sentences, etc.) may suggest a different way to organize those same thoughts, images and rhythms.

Critics use the term "end-stopped" to describe a line whose syntatic units (e.g. sentence, phrase, clause) match up with the the length of the line. An end-stopped line will usually end with some form of punctuation that accentuates the break. Note these lines from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, which are written in heavily end-stopped couplets:
Say first, of God above or Man below
What can we reason but from what we know?
Of man what see we but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He who thro' vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples every star,
May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are:
But of this frame, the bearings and the ties,
The strong connexions, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look'd thro'; or can a part contain the whole?
By contrast, in enjambed lines the syntactic units spill across multiple lines. These lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale are heavily enjambed:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown.

What, broadly speaking, are the passages from Pope and Shakespeare about? How does the poet's use of enjambment or end-stopping echo the poem's theme or subject matter?

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