A little too much bad wine at the office party, so I'm going to make things short and simple and only give examples of enjambment based on noun-verb-line relationships. Obviously, there are lots of other ways to enjamb or not enjamb, and there are even some more ways to do it using nouns and verbs, but this will illustrate, I think, what I mean by degrees of enjambment. The examples are my invention. They're verse — iambic pentameter, in fact, and rhymed, but poetry they ain't. They're better than the wine, though.
Two independent clauses, one in each line, requires some kind of terminal punctuation and clearly means no enjambment:
There's not the faintest doubt about this pair —
They're separated by unmoving air;
A sentence with its noun phrase in one line and its verb phrase in the next produces only slightly less distinction between the lines than the full stop above:
Hearing this pair of lines play out their fate
May teach the listener how they separate.
One noun may govern two verb phrases, one in one line and one in the next. In this weak enjambment each line is still easily perceived as a unit, but the gap between the two has narrowed:
Two lines may run together for a while
And still have each their pinch of style,
But putting the noun and a lone verb in one line and the rest of the predicate in the next is pretty strong enjambment. In ths case, the strong caesura in the second line reinforces the lack of separation between lines:
While this pair almost finds a way to reach
Across the gap, cohering each to each,
And breaking a line in the middle of a compound noun or verb practically glues the lines together:
And this line, lonely for its sister, can
Not end at all until its sister can.
Dah Dah dit-dit-dit-dit Dah Dah …
8:26:42 PM
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