Line Endings: The Acrobats of Poetry

                       

              Line endings (also known by the more aggressive term “line breaks”) are the primary way that poetry is distinguished from prose.  The word “verse,” sometimes functioning as a synonym for “poetry,” embodies this distinction—from the Latin versus, meaning ‘turn of the plow, a furrow, a line of words.”  The Latin word has also come into English retaining the other meanings of ‘change,’ ‘overthrow,’ and ‘destroy.’ 

            Line endings—and the white spaces that follow—are yet another way that poetry invites us to free ourselves from our normal, prosaic ways of experience, to, like trapeze artists, fly with them—into new ways to free ourselves from staid ways of feeling and knowing.

            The traditional markers for line endings have been rhymes:

                                    Hickory, dickory dock,

                                    the mouse ran up the clock.

We know when we reach the end of the line by just hearing it.  In a world where literacy was rare, and poetry was an oral art, troubadours—traveling poets and singers—remembered poems more easily if they were rhymed.  This is the trapeze artist swinging from one platform to the other, safe landing each time.  We are delighted and relieved each time we get to the next rhyme.

            End-stopped line endings are those that end a phrase, clause, or sentence, usually with a comma or an end punctuation such as a period, exclamation point, or question mark.  Here, too, there is a sense of, to follow our guiding metaphor here, safe landing.  “The mouse ran up the clock.”  Predictable, and satisfying for being so.  There is a child in each of us that likes to be secure in what to expect.

            Originally, to land on end rhymes, poets began to end lines in the middle of clauses and phrases and phrases that included the rhyming word. Here are the first four lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The first line is a complete subject/verb clause, but without punctuation is not literally end-stopped for the line straddles the first and second lines on “behold/when.”  The word for such continuations is enjambment—which derives from the French jamb, which means ‘leg’—hence what I call “straddle.”  That “behold” ends the first line is evocative—we hold at the end of the line before swinging down to the beginning of the next.  The acrobat swings to one end, seems to suspend for a moment, twirls around on the bar and swings back to her starting platform.

            The second line divides the verb “hang” from its explanatory phrase “Upon those boughs.”  Traditional readers will read across the two lines without a pause.  But the white space at the end of line endings function as a half-comma.  The pause after “hang” hangs us up for a moment—that second when the acrobat’s leap is at its apex, before she dives for the bar to return.  Line-endings are musical rests that call for a slight hesitation before we dive to the next line.

            In her poem “Sex Without Love,” Sharon Olds enjambs some of her lines in even more radical ways.  Here’s an excerpt:

                                                              …faces

                        red as steak, wine, wet as the

                        children at birth whose mothers are going to

                        give them away.  How do they come to the

                        come to the come to the God come to the

                        still waters, and not love

It is rare enough to divide a preposition from its object to/give, but to divide the article “the” from its noun is disturbing and divisive: the line ending at “the”… makes us search for its object, and in the loss and division and in the searching we, as readers, re-enact what it is to partake in sex without love.  This is flying without a net!

            Student poet Alison Silva, crafted her line endings to recreate the difficult experience of watching her father undergo a medical exam.  Here is her first draft:

                        X-Ray Vision

                        The yellow mush

                        wedged on top of your abdomen,

                        the small white bubbles growing fast inside your liver

                        Your rapidly beating heart pumping thick blood to your veins.

By enjambing on the strong word “mush,” the first line of the poem rivets our attention. And Alison’s instinct to place “wedged” on the second line enhances the meaning of the word.  If “wedged” were at the end of the first line, the white space after it would give us a contradictory sense of freedom.  Yet, without a verb, we swing down to the second line, and are “wedged” between “mush” and the end-stop after “abdomen,” just as the yellow tissue was.

           

            These first four lines significantly increase in length as we proceed.  Sometimes, that is the aesthetic we want.  But during workshop, we considered how we might amplify the experience by introducing more line endings:

                        the small white bubbles growing

                        fast inside your liver,

                        your rapidly beating heart pumping thick

                        blood to your veins.

Now, the long line starting with “the small white,” which was weighted down by too many words, transforms, through a line ending, to a fast line “fast inside your liver.” 
“Your rapidly beating heart pumping thick” thickens that line.  The line read alone has the word “thick” functioning as a truncated adverb: “heart pumping thick(ly).  Then we realize that this is an enjambment that transforms “thick” into an adjective modifying “blood.”  Two meaning textures created by a change in line endings.

            There is much written about line endings as a source of meaning, momentum, effect. Take a look at your own poetry, and Reply here, showing how you are crafting your line endings to enhance the experiences you are embodying. 

            Line endings, hang upside-down as trapeze artists do—it is their work to keep the air of the poem moving, to give it momentum.  Are you standing on the platform, afraid to swing down?  Are you going to connect with another trapeze artist swinging upside down to catch you?  Will you twirl and spin?  Will you fly without a net?  How will you manage space?