The notion of enjambment has several uses. The first meaning mentioned in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) refers to the gun carriage that was used to secure or mount artillery .
The enjambment or carriage, in this framework, is a framework . The artillery was located on this structure : mortars, cannons, etc. In a broader sense, all frames formed with crossed timbers that are used to support some element are called enjambment.
Beyond these meanings, the idea of enjambment usually appears in the field of poetry and literature in general. This is what the act and consequence of enjambing a phrase or word is called.
What is meant by enjambment in this context? To the distribution, in hemistichs or contiguous verses , of fragments that usually constitute a phonetic and syntactic or lexical unit.
Let's briefly review the definition of hemistichium. It is a fragment (which can be half the size) of a verse. The hemistich is separated from the rest of the verse by making use of a pause when intoning it, something that in technical language is known as a caesura .
This concept, for its part, is defined as the pause or space that separates a verse into two parts, which are called hemistichs. In cases where the number of syllables is greater than eleven, the verse must be divided into at least two hemistiches. Going into more precise questions, the closure of a hemistich is, according to the law of final accent, the point at which a verse ends; For this reason, if your last word is esdrújula we must subtract one syllable, add one if it is acute and leave it as it is if it is flat.
In our language, the meter recognizes the hemistich in verses whose number of syllables exceeds nine (those considered high art ); such is the case of the dodecasyllable and the alexandrine .
Before talking about the types of verse just mentioned, we must clarify that if its length is considerable, there may be more than three caesuras . As the term itself indicates, the twelve-syllable verse has twelve syllables; With respect to hemistichs, one is used to divide it into two parts of six syllables each. The Alexandrian, on the other hand, has fourteen, which are divided into two groups of seven each.
In this way, enjambment is a literary figure that represents a mismatch between the metric unit and the syntactic unit . This enjambment causes elements of the syntactic unit of the following verse to be brought forward at the end of a verse , or a syntactic unit to be split into two verses.
It can be stated, resorting to colloquial language , that a phrase ends up being placed “straddling” two verses. This particularity generates different stylistic effects.
The meaning can extend from one verse to another, flowing until the end of the verse or breaking abruptly. We can find examples of enjambment in works by Antonio Machado , Miguel Hernández , Francisco de Quevedo and other authors.
Enjambment can be seen in the poem “Children's Memory” by Machado , to cite one case: “A cold, brown afternoon / in winter. Schoolchildren / study. Monotony / of rain behind the glass .
Broadly speaking, we can say that there are several types of enjambment:
* abruptly the meaning extends between two verses, although in the second it breaks suddenly;
* soft : the meaning is prolonged but flows until the end of the second verse;
* lexical : the division is made on a word;
* syrrematic : a group is cut that the language prevents from separating, such as the one formed by a noun, an adjective and another noun .