Enjambment and Musicality

Many of Kelly's lines run-on across the line break without any pause in sense or meaning, and this technique is called enjambment, which comes from the French verb for striding over, encroaching on, or straddling. There are a number of reasons that poets choose to employ enjambment, and perhaps the most basic is that the technique keeps the reader moving through the lines, connecting the meaning across the text and making the poem flow together. Enjambment also provides a more varied rhythm in poems such as "The Satyr's Heart," which, like many of Kelly's poems, is musical and has some of the characteristics of a song. This musicality involves a rhythm that is often difficult to describe, but it often includes alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds), such as in line 16 ("flag," "flag," "fanfare," "fare,") or in line 21 ("cease," "sew," "sweet," "sad"). "So, and so," from...