Unless you happen to be a poet—better yet, a French poet—you may not be familiar with the word enjambment. Enjambment, from the French meaning “a striding over,” is a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break, so the reader is carried smoothly and swiftly—without interruption—to the next line of the poem

You may also not be familiar with the poet Mary Oliver. Put her on your summer reading list. Why? "You do not have to be good." That’s the first line of one of her poems. Come on, what else could you want from a first line? In her Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver explains that “When… the poet enjambs the line—turns the line so that a logical phrase is interrupted—it speeds the line for two reasons: curiosity about the missing part of the phrase impels the reader to hurry on, and the reader will hurry twice as fast over the obstacle of a pause because it is there. We leap with more energy over a ditch than over no ditch.”
That’s one reason poets use enjambment: to speed up the pace of the poem or to create a sense of urgency, tension, or rising emotion as the reader is pulled from one line to the next. Enjambed lines pique the reader’s interest—if the sentence or thought isn’t completed by the line break, one’s curiosity (where are we headed with this?) leads them down to the next line, which might complicate the previous line, expand upon it, or clarify it. Poets can also create a sense of surprise or introduce some humor with their enjambed lines, moving the reader toward unexpected ideas or subjects