Enjambment

Pronounced en-JAM-ment.

Enjambment: Running a sentence past the end of a poetic line so the meaning spills into the next.

Enjambment sets the line break against the sentence: the pause falls where the grammar doesn't want it, creating suspense, speed or a double meaning at the turn.

Enjambment examples

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills - the sentence pours over the line break."

  — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth

• "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow - four sentences' worth of breaks inside one sentence."

  — The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

• "Milton's blank verse in Paradise Lost runs its sense 'variously drawn out from one verse into another' - his own description of the technique."

  — Paradise Lost, John Milton

• "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land."

  — The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

Try it on your own writing: Meter Checker - scan your own lines

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