The poetic device in which a line continues into the next without a grammatical pause is called enjambment. The word comes from the French enjamber, meaning “to straddle” or “step over.”
In an enjambed passage, the line break arrives before the sentence or phrase is complete. That break can create suspense because the reader briefly has to wait for the missing grammatical information. It can also speed up the rhythm, imitate natural speech, or make a particular word at the line’s edge stand out.
The opposite technique is end-stopping, where a line ends with punctuation or a complete grammatical unit. Enjambment is not simply the absence of a comma or full stop: the key feature is that the syntax or meaning carries forward. It can appear in blank verse, free verse, rhymed verse, and even tightly structured couplets. Assonance and alliteration concern sound patterns, while caesura is a pause within a line.