Question

Which lines in this excerpt from the poem "Dreams" by Edgar Allan Poe use enjambment?

Answer 1

Answer: My spirit not awakening, till the beam

Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.

Twere better than the cold reality

Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,

Explanation: Enjambment, derived from the French word enjambment, meaning to step over, or put legs across. In poetry it means moving over from one line to another without a finishing punctuation mark. It can be defined as a thought or sense, phrase or clause, in a line of poetry that does not end at the line break, but goes over to the next line. In other words, it is the running on of a sense from one couplet or line to the following without a major interruption or syntactical break.

Answer 2

My spirit not awakening, till the beam

Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.

AND

'Twere better than the cold reality

Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,

Enjambment is when a sentence continues across two lines of poetry without a pause. When reading poetry, the reader does not pause at the end of each line, instead one should pause only according to the punctuation. The lines that end with "beam" and "reality" have no punctuation and therefore should not have a pause. The lines ending in dream, morrow, sorrow, and be all have some form of punctuation so these lines are not enjambment.