Enjambment+--+Yongmin

The Impact of Enjambments in ‘Erosion’ Prose writing is like going a hundred miles per hour on a highway; you never stop until you get from point A, to point B. Sentences in an expository article or essay are never enjambed; phrases need to flow smoothly and efficiently, thereby bring the readers from one point to the other with ease. The goal here is to be clear and straight-forward. By contrast, reading poetry is nothing like driving down the highway. There are way too many speed bumps! Poets manipulate line breaks and punctuation to create rhythm and tone. The poet gives you a speed limit; you cannot receive the intended effect of the poem by ignoring pauses along the way. In ‘Erosion’ by Linda Paston, the enjambments influence the tone, rhythm and theme of the poem. Erosion is an insidious, relentless process. Paston manipulates the breaks in the lines of her poem to depict this theme. She evokes the image of a menacing sea, slowly and abrasively wearing down the soil that serves as the basis of our nourishment. Just as the sea wears the soil down little by little, Paston unravels her poetry in short, disconnected parts. Take a look at the first stanza; instead of writing everything in a single line, Paston presents the phrase in short segments: We are slowly / undermined. Grain / by grain. Reading the parceled out fragments of the sentence give the sense that the soil is eroding away, piece by piece. Paston’s enjambments add to the theme by rendering the poem’s form to physically embody the process of erosion. As one can see in stanza three, the amount of words seem to whittle down as you read on. “Though it will swallow us whole, soon / there will be / nothing left / but view.” It is no coincidence that the words “erode” away as you read on. Paston uses line breaks and manipulates the shape of the stanzas in order to depict the insidious process of erosion. But more than anything, the greatest power of the line breaks is that they control the //rhythm//. Clearly, ‘Erosion’ has no absolute meter, nor does it have a set rhyme scheme. But, there is a pattern; every few syllables, the line breaks. These line breaks serve as speed bumps for the readers’ eyes. The poet, by using enjambments, prevents the reader from reading at lightning speed. Although there is no fixed rhythm, the pauses created by line breaks definitely create a slow, steady reading pace. What is the effect of this tempered pace? It is to portray the slow and gradual process of erosion and to add tension. Enjambments play a huge role in adding tension and suspense into the poem’s tone. Again, this relates to the bigger theme of the ‘Erosion’ – the impending apocalypse. Paston’s references insinuate that this poem is about the end of the world; “long row of scythes” is symbolic of the idea of death ; “we are becoming an ark already” is an allusion to Noah’s Ark, which salvaged Noah and his family from a worldwide deluge. With the amount of religious allusions involved, Paston may even be referring to the Judgment Day and the ensuing annihilation of the Earth. With no doubt, Paston is dealing with a morbid idea. Hence it comes as no surprise that the tone of the poem is dark and suspenseful. How do the line breaks add suspense? They direct the readers’ eyes to certain parts of the phrase. Take a look at the first line of the last stanza – “The gulls will follow / our wake.” By setting ‘our wake’ from the rest of the sentence, Paston directs our eyes to it. Isolation puts more weight and tension on the words, thereby establishing suspense. The words “our wake” has so much more impact and significance due to the enjambment. Had this sentence been pieced together in one line, the there would be less of the suspense that we see in the original broken sentence. It is amazing what simple pauses can do to poetry. The line breaks help to reinforce the theme of erosion, create a slow paced cadence, and build a suspenseful tone. Had enjambments not been put in place, it would detract from the poem’s powerful message – presaging of the impending day of reckoning. When reading poetry, must be mindful of the spaces and pauses in between the lines.

Comments: I thought your idea that the poet gives a ‘speed limit,’ and that the ‘line breaks serve as speed bumps for the for the readers’ eyes,’ was very interesting. I agree that when I read this poem out loud, the enjambments created a rhythm that made me pause more, and this affected the overall mood and tone of the poem.