Final stopping is the interruption of an idea at the end of a poetic line. It can make poetry more accessible. Limitless poetry can be confusing but provides flexibility. Free verse may not require final stopping. Classical poetry doesn’t always use it, especially in drama.
In poetry, final stopping is the phenomenon of the interruption of a sentence, sentence or idea in conjunction with the end of a poetic line. This can be relevant regardless of the form of the poem, whether it has fixed-length lines, or multiple lines of free-flowing verse. Many view the limit switch as a process of making poetry more accessible and coherent, as most readers are used to reading poetry where one line represents an established individual idea or phrase.
One of the best ways to describe the limit switch is to contrast it with examples of poetry that don’t use this technique. As a basic example, the first two lines of a poem that would include the limit switch might look like this, with the line differentiation noted by a backslash: “The man was sitting in a chair/ There was also a little dog… ” – Here, the two sentences of the poetic couplet each end where the poetic lines end.
Conversely, an example of a limitless poem might look like this: “A man was sitting, arms outstretched/in a chair, hair neatly combed…” Here, the total concept of the two lines might be conceived as a single idea, composed of strings of adjectives, where the first adjective forms the end of the first line, with additional adjectives and adjective clauses drawing the second line. Many readers can see how endless poetry can be confusing as the ending of individual ideas is made much more ambiguous. At the same time, it provides the poet with much greater flexibility.
Many modern examples of endless poetry are composed in free verse, meaning that the poem lacks a metre, or fixed line length. In these poems the narrative is also expressed in a series of short and abstract fragments. Complete ideas may not even be concretely composed, and therefore limit-switching may not be a very pertinent technique.
Even in classical poetry, stopping lines symmetrically was not a universal technique, particularly where a fixed meter was used for lines of drama. Dramatic speech does not always adhere to a rigid line pattern, and so readers can often find instances of the classic iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets, or other conventional classical poetic forms, which have some lines, which do not use the technique.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
