This technique is common in poetry from many time periods and is prevalent in many different forms, including sonnets, blank verse, and free verse.
Enjambment Examples
Examples of enjambment can be found in William Shakespeare’s “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:"
(Lines 1-4)
The first two lines are examples of enjambed lines, in which the line breaks in the middle of the sentence. The last two lines are known as end-stopped lines, which end with punctuation that facilitates a pause in the reading. The degree of enjambment can vary depending on where the line break occurs within the structure of the sentence. The first line here is more noticeably enjambed in this example, because it breaks between the subject and the verb. The reader is left with confusion at the end of the line as to where the sentence is headed, or what the speaker is trying to convey. The second line is an example of less severe enjambment because it ends before a dependent clause; “Love is not love” could stand on its own as a full sentence, so the line break here is not as jarring as the first line break. Still, the line is not punctuated, and the reader must continue on for a deeper explanation of the poem's meaning.
Poetic Effects
Enjambment can be used to create different effects in poetry. In some cases, its abruptness can increase the speed and pace of the poem, as the reader must hurriedly catch up to the next line to extract the meaning from the sentence. In the above example, Shakespeare does not include the first verb until the second line, thus forcing the reader to rush to the second line to make sense of the first line. Increased speed as well as increased ambiguity can jar the reader's perceptions and create confusion; in some poems, this is the end goal of enjambment, while others simply use it to remain within the meter or rhyme scheme.
Shakespeare also uses enjambment here to partially conceal the rhyme of the poem. This can be useful to prevent poems from having “sing-song” rhyming qualities, where the reader is distracted by the strong rhyming sounds and pays more attention to the sound than to the meaning of the poem. Enjambment also allows writers to strategically place emphasis on certain words, and to create individual, separate meanings for specific lines.
