Question

Which of these lines from Shakespeare's "Sonnet 61" ends with an emjambment? (10 points)

Answer 1

  Line two ends with an enjambment.The line keeps the same idea running into the next line without a syntactical break..." Is it thy will, thy image should keep open.." jumps into..."My heavy eyelids to the weary night...."   There is no punctuation mark between the line, whereas in between lines 3 and 4 there is a comma.

Answer 2

The correct answer is LINE 1 ("Is it thy will, thy image should keep open"). That's the line that ends with an enjambment.

In poetry, an enjambment refers to the incomplete syntax at the end of a line. Think of it as a sentence that is broken up in the middle, you can't get the meaning of it until you go down to the next line and get the full sentence. You can recognize enjambment by a lack of punctuation at the end of the line and the tension this creates. Once you move along and read the next line, that tension is resolved. The word or phrase that completes the syntax is known as "rejet".

In this case we have the line "Is it thy will, thy image should keep open", in which the syntax feels incomplete as we don't know what should be kept open, and it doesn't have punctuation at the end so it's clearly an enjambment. The next line begins with "my heavy eyelids", which completes the syntax and resolves the tension and therefore represents the rejet.

Hope this helps!