RRhetoric
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Omission & Flow

Enjambment

en-JAM-ment / ɪnˈdʒæmmənt

A verse line that ends before its sentence does, pushing the reader across the break. For a moment the line means one thing alone and another once continued, and the carried-over word lands with momentum.

"April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…" — Eliot

Don't confuse it with. An end-stopped line completes its grammar at the break. Caesura is a pause *inside* the line, not at its edge.

Drill this device — 12 excerpts

In the Reader — 12 excerpts

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno (translated by John Ciardi) · open the passage →
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
— John Milton, Paradise Lost · open the passage →
I sing the body electric,
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
— Robert Frost, North of Boston · open the passage →
Let us go then, you and I,
— T.S. Eliot, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse · open the passage →
And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood
— Robert Frost, Mountain Interval · open the passage →
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land · open the passage →
Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land · open the passage →
He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
— Robert Frost, New Hampshire · open the passage →
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees
— William Butler Yeats, The Tower · open the passage →
We real cool. We Left school. We
— Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters · open the passage →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with enjambment most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 7 Metaphor 6 Polysyndeton 4 Parallelism 3 Chiasmus 3 Catachresis 3 Polyptoton 3

The rest of the family

Asyndeton Polysyndeton Ellipsis Brachylogia Aposiopesis