A striking instance of enjambement between verses underpinning meaning occurs between the penultimate and final verses of Philip Larkin’s "At Grass" from his 1955 volume
The Less Deceived. But the whole poem demonstrates his formal skill and illustrates, too, the fact that enjambement cannot usefully be considered without taking into account the relationship between syntax and metre.
The first verse describes the peaceful setting in which the two retired racehorses, the subject of the poem, now find themselves. It is built entirely out of end-stopped lines, whose steadiness has the effect of underlining the quiet of the scene. With the second verse, however, Larkin begins an evocation of their very public past, and at this point the syntax begins to overrun the line-ends, creating a rising sense of excitement, a process intensified in the third verse in the reduction of the sense units to a series of short noun phrases. At the end of this verse, however, Larkin skilfully slows the pace by drawing out the last of these noun phrases over two and half lines, miming metrically and syntactically the sense of his words. The fourth verse, turning back to the present - the two horses at pasture - reverts to end-stopped lines, except for the final line of the verse, which suspends the subject ("they") across the stanza break as if to suggest the division that has opened up between the public past of these two horses and their retired and private present:
Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries -
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies :
Only the grooms, and the grooms boy,
With bridles in the evening come.
Also, the rhythmic organisation of the last line of verse 4 has the effect of throwing weight (metrical and intonational) on to "names" and "they", thereby marking the opposition between these two terms which is at the heart of the poem.
The whole poem can be seen at
http://www.nth-dimension.co.uk/vl/poem.asp?id=1420 and also at
http://www.jacana.demon.co.uk/poetry/larkin.htm. - though with some minor typos.
The skill Larkin shows here in managing the relationship between syntax and metre is evident in many other poems, for instance, in "An Arundel Tomb", from
The Whitsun Weddings (1964).
Clive Watkins
[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited December 10, 2001).]