The start of
The Waste Land by
T. S. Eliot, with only lines 4 and 7 end-stopped: These lines from
Shakespeare's ''
The Winter's Tale (c.'' 1611) are heavily enjambed (meaning enjambment is used): Meaning flows as the lines progress, and the reader's eye is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like
"flow-of-thought" with a sensation of urgency or disorder. In contrast, the following lines from
Romeo and Juliet (
c. 1595) are completely end-stopped: Each line is formally correspondent with a unit of thought—in this case, a clause of a sentence. End-stopping is more frequent in early Shakespeare: as his style developed, the proportion of enjambment in his plays increased. Scholars such as Goswin König and
A. C. Bradley have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment.
Endymion by
John Keats, lines 2–4: The song "One Night In Bangkok", from the musical
Chess, written by
Tim Rice and
Björn Ulvaeus, includes examples such as : Closely related to enjambment is the technique of "
broken rhyme" or "split rhyme" which involves the splitting of an individual word, typically to allow a rhyme with one or more syllables of the split word. In English verse, broken rhyme is used almost exclusively in
light verse, such as to form a
word that rhymes with "orange", as in this example by
Willard Espy, in his poem "The Unrhymable Word: Orange": The
clapping game "
Miss Susie" uses the break "... Hell / -o operator" to allude to the taboo word "
Hell", then replaces it with the innocuous "
Hello". Similarly, the Spanish-language song "
La Camisa Negra" leads the listener to imagine an obscenity before the next verse completes the word more innocently. ==See also==