Literary Term of the week: Caesura
A caesura: Shay-zher-uh. Though, dictionary.reference.com has it as si-zhoor-ah. It is the slight pause in the middle(ish) of a line. Every line has that turning point, between clauses, or between words. Sometimes it’s punctuated, sometimes not. It can also mean the midway point of a poem. A lot of times it coincides with a slight turn in the poem that leads to the actual turn. Here are a couple examples:
from Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died”
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
The caesuras in the two lines are there, do you see them? After “uncertain” and “light.” The second line, being iambic tetrameter, the technical mean of the line would be between syllables 3 and 4, before light, however, splitting iambs like that isn’t typical. Don’t ask me why. We’ll call that a soft pause. A soft pausing caesura. Sounds good.
A more obvious line, also from Emily Dickinson, in “Because I could not stop for death”
My Tippet – only Tulle –
Here the emdash clearly marks a hard pausing caesura.
It isn’t a thing of the past, either. Check it out in *picking a poet at random from Poets.org* Charles Simic, Pigeons at Dawn.
Extraordinary efforts are being made
To hide things from us, my friend.
Here we have a standard caesura, after efforts, and then a slightly off-center caesura, after us. Sometimes punctuation is the cause of the caesura, and it can postpone or hasten the longest pause of the line.
Caesuras are one of those prosody sciences which are more like arts. Consider Robert Bly’s assertion that there are no true spondees, so that metrical foot can only be termed spondaic. That two stressed syllables placed side by side will always have slightly differing levels of stress. I’m horribly paraphrasing, of course, as I’m best at, but you get the idea. Caesuras are one of those speech things that have fewer set rules than the CSULB Spring Holiday schedule.