There could
be a variety of reasons why Ali chose to use enjambment in the third and fourth stanzas of
"Postcard from Kashmir." Out of your three choices, the least likely is three.
Enjambment is a literary device used in poetry that affects the flow of the piece and the
words/phrases that are focused on. Hardly ever will a poet use it to make reading
"convenient."
The second option is the most likely: force the
reader to notice specific phrases. Enjambment is a good technique to use when you do not want to
use bold or italics for emphasis. Because of the natural pause that arises when you finish a
line of a poem before moving on to the next, the reader is left focusing on the last phrase or
word of that line. For example:
This is home. And this the
closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
The
sentence continues to the third line, but let us focus on these two lines. The first line
emphasizes the word "closest" because of where Ali broke the sentence and created a
new line. The reader is focused to feel the emotion left hanging by the first line and embrace
the importance of that feeling in the context of the poem.
Your first option,
a visual representation, could be correct for some poems. However, in Ali's case, there is not
really a shape to be made. That said, even though it is not the best choice, enjambment is a
technique that is also used to make a poem more visually appealing on the page. Although it is
not being used in Ali's case to create a shape, it is used to prevent long lines from extending
from one side of the page to the other.
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