Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

17.7 What to look for in verse
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

Verse is interesting for a number of reasons. Metrical verse is characterized by a degree of formal complexity perhaps greater than that found in any other aspect of literature; for this reason, some researchers have suggested that the possibility of composing metrical verse reflects deep aspects of how we process language. This is much debated, and there is still no general agreement on how best to understand how metres work.

In the reading of specific verse texts, one of the questions often worth asking is whether the different kinds of constituent structure match or mismatch. In verse, the major constituent is the line. The language of the text is also divided into major constituents - sentence, subordinate clauses and phrases - and it is worth asking whether in a particular text line endings are matched with major linguistic constituent endings. Matches or mismatches might give rise to aesthetic effects of coherence or complexity, and their use might reflect the aesthetic attitudes of the time. An example of mismatch, where the line ending interrupts a syntactic constituent (a phenomenon called ’enjambment’) can be found in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805):

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Press’d closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth

Uplifted, . . .

In both first and second lines a noun phrase is interrupted, with the noun coming at the end of the line and a modifying phrase (contained in the same phrase as the noun) coming at the beginning of the next line. Mismatches between syntactic and line structure are common in this text, but much less common in poetry of the preceding century, with its different aesthetic aims. Compare the following lines from a poem by John Brown published in 1776:

. . . Now every eye,

Oppressed with toil, was drowned in deep repose;

Here, too, we have a noun separated from its modifier by a line break. Though superficially similar, the major difference is that the modifying phrase is separated from the noun by a comma, and in fact constitutes additional information about an already established phrase ’every eye’. Thus it is not as coherently bound to the preceding noun as the modifiers in the Wordsworth text, where the modifiers crucially express what the body parts are doing and hence are very tightly bound to the noun in the preceding line. Thus there is no reason to describe the Brown text as involving enjambment.