Both
caesura and enjambment serve to capture 's emotional state as she digests the news that her
newly wed husband has just killed her beloved
cousin.
Caesura is known as a pause in the
middle of a line of poetry. It can be created with punctuation in the middle of the line, or it
can simply be created as a natural pause in the words. Juliet's lines 76-88 in Act 3, Scene 5
contain several instances of caesura. We can especially see caesura in the string of oxymora
Juliet uses to describe . When we hear the pauses between elements of the oxymora, we can feel
Juliet's mind working to grasp the conflicting ways she now views Romeo and to grasp the idea
that she feels she can no longer trust him. We especially see caesura in the lines:
O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring
face!
...
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather'd raven!
wolvish-ravening lamb! (76-79)
In the first line, the
comma between "heart" and "hid" creates caesura, while the exclamation
points create caesura in the other two lines. The pauses created by the punctuation serve to
emphasize the contrast between the images in the lines. They also serve to emphasize Juliet's
emotions as she now realizes that what she thought was beautiful and wonderful can now actually
be evil and deceptive.
Enjambment is the
opposite of caesura. Through the use of enjambment, a person reads one line of poetry into the
next without any stops. Instead of the reader's eyes stopping at either the middle or the end of
line, the reader's eyes are automatically carried down into the next line because there are no
stops. The effect can produce a sense of speed, which when capturing emotions, can create the
sense of rambling thoughts that one can think in times of intense emotion or stress. When one is
faced with an earth shattering realization, such as Juliet is being faced with, our thoughts
sometimes blend into one big, messy whole. Shakespeare's use of enjambment in this passage
creates just such an effect. We can especially see enjambment in the lines:
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell
When thou didst
bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh? (83-85)
Since there are no punctuation marks in these lines to force a
reader to stop, a person reads one line into the next at rapid speed. The speed at which we read
these lines shows us that this is a question Juliet feels she absolutely must ask. It does not
make sense to her that her God, or nature, would create someone who looks as beautiful as Romeo
who could also do such evil deeds. Through reading these lines created with enjambment, the
reader better sees just how much the issue of 's death is weighing on Juliet's mind and
soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment