What is Pause?

Pause is an important aspect of metrics and music in poetry. The ordinary punctuations and also the pauses without any punctuation are all taken as poetic pauses, too in poetry. Besides, the line-end is regarded as a special pause or poetic punctuation in poetry.

It is the breaking of lines that gives pauses and the meditative quality to poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow". When we pause at the end of every line in the poem, we begin to realize who is the person meditating, where, why, on what, and so on. Without the pauses or line breaks, the poem would be a simple prose sentence with little meaning.

Pauses in poetry not only help us to understand the poem in a critical way but also to analyze its technical aspects in a fullest sense. Because of these pauses we gain the musical quality in a poem and separate it distinctively with other form of art and literature.

Published on 23 Jan. 2014 by Kedar Nath Sharma