From the French enjamber, innit. Literally means to encroach or straddle (the lines) - see helpful illustration below, but don't try this on your local railway tracks as the results are not pleasant. It's also worth knowing that jambe is the French word for leg.
We went to see Hamlet, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Blackpool Grand Theatre earlier this evening, and it was brilliant. Best play of all time. I studied it for A-level English and at university. It's a good job Blackpool FC managed a win this afternoon, because I would have struggled with two tragedies in one day.
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| enjambment personified - sense the tension |
How and why it works.
As a poetic device, it's well famous. When reading a poem with an enjambed (rather than an end-stopped) line, the sense of that line of verse is not self-contained, meaning the syntax is not complete and the meaning runs over into the following line without punctuation, thus giving rise to a tension that is only resolved by the rejet, (more French, dudes), the word or phrase on the subsequent line that completes the syntax.
Dismembering Enjambment.
If that's not clear, let me break it down for you, with reference to the illustration above. The width of rails in Canada, also known as the track gauge, is 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (or 1.435 metres). If a person is taller than that, say 6ft (or 1.829 metres) and is tied to the rails in the path of an oncoming locomotive, his head and his lower legs enjamb the lines and will get chopped off by the passing train. That will leave a neat 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in body section, the standard width of the lines, plus two or three other separated body parts (head and legs) further down the track. The true identity of the poet (did I not mention that bit? someone couldn't abide his rhymes or so I guess), will only be resolved when all the bits are taken in conjunction, jammed together without punctuation.
A very short history.
Homer was doing it 2,500 years ago - even before French was a thing. Clever geezer, that one. Some of the Biblical dudes followed suit, though that's probably gained in translation during Stuart times. Those clever Metaphysicals loved it. .And Shakespeare, the GOAT, was well into his enjambments, wasn't he. Take his word for it, not mine.
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| Hamlet by the GOAT, performed by the RSC at Blackpool Grand Theatre |
Anyway, here's one of Hamlet's soliloquys. It's from Act IV scene iv and it's full of enjambment...
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th'event -
A thought which quartered hath but one part
Wisdom and ever three parts coward - I do not know
Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do",
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't...Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare
Even for an eggshell... Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood
And let all sleep? while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause
Which is not tomb enough and continent
to hide the slain? O, from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.
Thanks for reading. Mind how you go, S ;-)
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