The Power of Enjambment
A quick look at how enjambment can be used in poetry.
Enjambment is an essential tool in the poet’s toolbox. Merium Webster defines enjambment as, “the running over of a sentence from one verse or couplet into another so that closely related words fall in different lines”. In poetry, the last word in a line is often the most important. It is made so by the extra time it has to sit with the reader as they navigate the whitespace to the next line. The final word therefore a tool designed to emphasize some aspect or theme of the poem: whether that be in the form of a hard-hitting rhyme, contributing to the emotional weight of the poem, etc.
This importance of the last word in a line then gives the writer a great opportunity to subvert the reader’s expectations in the follow-up line. Let’s look at how Austin Hummel uses enjambment to lull you into a false sense of security before building a sense of dread in the first stanza of his poem “Look at the Pretty Clouds”:
The most important thing about ice is that it has no pattern. It takes our children/ when they drive home from college for clean clothes and stuffing, not yet awake to the mythology of gathering and the beauty of food. The most important thing about logging trucks is the woosh that diverts their attention from the ice they think is asphalt. After the first whiff of cedar they hang on and when they look up it seems like god for a second has parted the snow with a piece of night. And that’s when they die. The most important thing about Thanksgiving is that we’re always looking the other way.
We start the poem off with a bit of mystery… what is the most important thing about ice? I’m left (thanks to the line break) with time to ponder. Is it ice’s ability to cool you down on a hot day? Maybe it’s something to do with ices ability to purify? Austin then hits us with an answer that I don’t think I would have ever come up with, but one that makes perfect sense after we’ve finished the piece.
“…it has no patten” didn’t jump out to me as sinister on my first read. My mind went more to how every snowflake is meant to be unique. However, it was the enjambment in the next line gave me a hint of dread, “It takes our children”. Again, not overly sinister on the first read. At this point I was imagining something along the lines of “It takes our child sliding to a palace of playfulness”.
The next line then hits us full force with dread while also darkly recontextualized everything that came before. “It takes our children / when they drive home from college for clean clothes”. Now we realize that this poem is morning a child lost to a car crash caused by ice; ice which has no motive or pattern in when it takes someone from us forever.
If this poem had no line breaks, if it lacked enjambment, I think the impact of the realization of what the poem was really about would be greatly diminished. Of course, enjambment isn’t the only tool employed to achieve this effect— the title is also doing some heavy lifting in playing with our expectations.
Finally, I’d like to look at the first stanza of one of my poems, “How Robbie® the RadioShack™ Robot Banker Became a God” employs enjambment to a different effect:
I was often sick of my sister, and she of me, but that all stopped when she got sick of me always being sick, and decided it was her turn.
Here I am using enjambment in a much more playful way. I’m using it to subvert expectations, and then again to unsubvert them. The subject starts informing the reader that they were often sick, but then the next line indicates they were often fed up with their sister. By the end we see that both are true. In this roundabout toying with expectations, I’m also attempting to mimic the way children communicate— how one often must piece together meaning from several sometimes scattered fragments.
Enjambment is one of my favorite tools in the poet’s toolbox. It can be used to enhance any emotion, to inject humor, and perhaps to achieve the most essential of all poetic goals
surprise.
References:
“enjambment.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enjambment (11 November 2025).
Hummell, Austin. “Look at the Pretty Clouds.” Old Flame, WordFarm, 2012, p. 42.