Enjambment and End-stopping in the Magnum Opus of the Three Renowned poets: Chaucer, Gower, Langland

Abstract

Poetry, being one of the two main categories of literature in general, has recently been subject to subordinate attention in literatures in terms of form, especially the poetic part of medieval epoch. Alongside the structural and semantic aspects of poetry, there still remain some elements of this style not fully investigated and developed. Amongst such we can name end-stopping andenjambment, which are some categorical elements, most of the poets, either intentionally or ignorantly, have administered from the medieval era to the present time. In this paper, the existence of enjambment and end-stopping was investigated in three of most renowned poetic works of Middle-English era, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langand's Piers the Plowman. By comparing the original text of the poems with the translated form of them, it was understood that the existence of end-stopping was more significant and the number of end-stopped lines were more than enjambed ones. It was then concluded that medieval poets, specially these three, used mostly a language simple in structure and easy to understand syntactically, free from the complexity that enjambment brings to the lines.