Strategy Response 1, Week 14

Poem: A Brittle Day Passed By

Strategy: Enjambments due to lack of commas and due to awkward line breaks.

In, ‘A Brittle Day Passed By’, the lines are primarily made of enjambments that evoke the feeling of time smoothly shifting or passing by the reader. This is achieved by the lack of commas where natural pauses fall as one reads the poem. For example, in the verses, “And then there was a tremor in his chest and he pointed/ at nothing to say there is something broken and she loved him,” it appears as if commas should fall after the words, “then,” “chest,” and “broken.” By writing these lines without the comma, the sense of pausing is essentially eliminated. Because there is no pause, there is nothing to stop the piece from continuously moving on to the next line. The enjambment scheme works because of the lack of commas throughout the piece. It also works because the instances where it appears one should breathe occur within the piece rather than at the end of a line break. Only three line breaks end with a period: line four, line seven, and the last line of the poem. The rest of the line breaks forces the reader to continue on to the next line. One cannot control the fluidity of the piece by taking a breath where they wish to, just as one cannot stop the passing of time or the passing of a day. Breaks come when the day calls for it, just as the commas and pauses for breath occur where the speaker dictates it in the piece.