And a few examples

 French for “striding over”  A poetic expression that spans more than one line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is not complete without the following line. Sometimes these lines are referred to as “run-on” lines.

“It is a beautious evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility.”

“I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his wretched women.”

 A pause in a line of poetry. Sometimes it occurs with punctuation, but occasionally it occurs where a slight pause is inevitable. The caesura is indicated not by the meter of the poem, but by natural speaking rhythm. The caesure is indicated with ||

From Willliam Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1893) “I will arise and go now,|| for always night and day I hear lake water lapping||with low sounds by the shore…” From Shakespeare: “To err is human, || to forgive, divine. From Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” “Had we but world enough, ||and time This coyness, lady, ||were no crime. We would sit down, ||and think which way To walk, ||and pass our long love’s day.

 A figure of speech in which directly and often emotionally a person who is dead or otherwise not physically present, an imaginary person or entity, something inhuman, supernatural, or a place or concept  The speaker addresses the object of the apostrophe as though it is present and capable of understanding.

From “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by Lord Byron: “I said to Love, ‘It is not now as in old days When men adored thee and thy ways All else above; Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One Who spread a heaven beneath the sun.’ I said to Love.”

From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (yes, apostrophe appears in prose as well) (Douglass is addressing ships sailing through Chesapeake Bay) “You are loosed from your moorings and are free; I am fast in my chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip!

The omission of part of a word (typically a letter) and the replacement of it with an apostrophe. Often employed to make verse more rhythmic, or to conform to a metrical pattern Like “Ne’er” for “never” or “o’er” for “over”

“Sol thro’ white curtains shot a tim’rous ray, And op’d those eyes that must eclipse the day…” (don’t you feel smart for recognizing this?) From “Beauty” by Abraham Cowley (1656) “Thou flatt’rer which compli’st every sight! Thou Babel which confound’st the eye With unintelligible variety!” (two versions of “apostrophe” here)

A rhetorical device in which certain words, sounds, concepts, or syntactic structures are reversed or repeated in reverse order. The term comes from the Greek letter X or “chi” implying that the two parts of a chiastic whole mirror each other like the letter.

Shakespeare (from Macbeth) “Fair is foul and foul is fair” From The Dead by James Joyce “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.” From Coleridge: “Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.” From John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”