Enjambment

I was surprised when looking into the history of enjambment to discover that its use went back much further than I had expected. I was getting prepared for a bit of a rant about contemporary poets cutting lines and rolling them over to the start of the next line for no apparent reason. However it seems, for instance, that Homer used the technique and it is used in the 32nd Psalm of the Hebrew Bible.

I’d better explain what the technique is before going any further:

‘Enjambment is when a sentence or phrase spans over more than one line of poetry. Because of this, a thought or idea carries on from one line to the next without a pause or punctuation mark at the end of the line’.

And thanks to Kassiani Nikolopoulou at QuillBot for that simple but clear definition. So many of the other definitions I looked at included words like syntax or couplets which can mean that someone then has to go and look up their meanings.

After finding that definition I was going to go on to my original idea but got stopped in my tracks by references to scholars such as Goswin König and A. C. Bradley who have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment. How on earth does that work?

An example quoted is this from Romeo and Juliet from around 1595:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punishèd.

Each line is complete in itself and the argument goes that this is an example of his early works.

Then there are these lines from The Winter's Tale, from about 1611, which use enjambment comprehensively:

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.

The point is that the reader's eye is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like ‘flow-of-thought’ with a sensation of urgency or disorder. It is said that this is a measure of Shakespeare’s development as a writer.

I should mention that the use of computer technology has confirmed this analysis. And how does that work? I got this from the AI overview to the question ‘How Computer-Aided Analysis Works’.

Stylometry & Machine Learning: Scholars use machine-learning algorithms to "train" a computer on a known, chronologically arranged corpus of Shakespeare's work (e.g., training on Coriolanus and The Tempest to analyse Henry VIII).

Quantifying Enjambment: Computers allow for rapid, precise counting of enjambed lines, pause patterns, and "weak" endings (endings that cannot pause) across thousands of lines, which would be labour-intensive to do manually.

Pause Patterns: Analysis shows that the distribution of pauses within iambic pentameter lines serves as a reliable chronological marker, allowing computers to place plays in a chronological sequence that largely matches the established scholarly consensus.

I found confirmation of the points in articles such as in MIT Technology Review.

But instead of a play let’s choose a sonnet.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

                                                      William Shakespeare

                         

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.