Inspired Sentence 12

The glasses are “brimmed,” about to overflow, just as the line itself flows over, the verse turns, into the next, with the violent enjambment on “muscatel/bubble.”

That’s from Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem (2006), a book I cherish. It’s a collection of fifteen lectures that Muldoon delivered during his tenure as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. Each piece explores a poem. The above quote comes from the first lecture, which focuses on W. B. Yeats’ “All Souls’ Night.” Muldoon is analyzing the line “And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel.” Muldoon shows how the line itself ingeniously enacts the brimfulness of the glasses by overflowing into the next line: “And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel / Bubble upon the table.” The technique is called “enjambment”: the continuation of a sentence without pause beyond the end of a line. I’m guessing that Muldoon calls this particular enjambment “violent” because it brings the sounds of two vivid words – “muscatel” and “bubble” – smack up against each other to create a sudden, surprising chime. 

I love sentences that contain bits of embedded quotation. They’re like Rauschenberg assemblages. This one by Muldoon is a beauty.