End Stop, Enjambment, Caesura

An educational sonnet

One of my students told me that she needed to understand these three poetic devices, and I couldn’t think of any better way to express them than through a poem. I assumed someone would have written a poem for this purpose before, but google didn’t turn anything up, so I wrote one myself.

End Stop, Enjambment, Caesura

A sentence holds a single thought, they say.
A line of poetry does much the same.
And thoughts that fit in even lines this way
Are orderly, well practiced, somewhat tame.

But sometimes we imagine monsters which
Exceed the bounds of lines. Emotions take
Us veering one way, only then to switch
And double back. It would seem merely fake

To trap these thoughts in packages of five
Iambic feet. They roam across the lines.
Caesuras? When there isn’t that mad drive,
We falter. Thoughts break within the line’s confines.

The final end-stopped couplet makes it whole.
The reader feels we’ve taken back control.

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I was pretty pleased with that! The ending’s a bit weak, and I don’t really get impassioned enough in the middle to justify my enjambments, so there’s a bit more work to be done, but I think for an hour’s work that turned out rather well.