Enjambment is the continuation of a syntactic unit — a phrase, clause, or sentence — past the end of a line break and into the next line. The word comes from the French enjamber, to step over or straddle.
An enjambed line pushes the reader forward: the eye reaches the end of the line, but the grammar is incomplete, so the reader must continue to the next line to complete the thought. This creates a tension between the visual structure of the poem (which says pause here) and the syntactic structure (which says keep going). That tension is one of the poet’s most expressive resources.
Enjambment can be mild (breaking after a modifier before its noun) or severe (breaking in the middle of a compound word or between an article and its noun). The more severe the enjambment, the stronger the pull across the break and the greater the emphasis on the word that begins the new line.
The opposite of enjambment is the end-stopped line, where the line break coincides with a syntactic boundary — a period, comma, or natural pause.
Related terms
- line break — the break across which enjambment operates
- caesura — a pause within the line, which can counterbalance enjambment
- volta — a structural turn that enjambment can either prepare or disrupt