A term you'll meet in poetic form.
A caesura is a pause inside a poetic line — a break in the middle of the verse, not at its end. The word comes from the Latin caedere, "to cut." A caesura is a place where the line is cut, where the voice rests for a beat in the middle of the meter.
Caesurae are usually produced by punctuation — a comma, semicolon, period, or dash mid-line. They can also be produced by syntax: a natural grammatical pause where no punctuation appears. Either way, the effect is the same: the line is divided into two unequal or equal half-lines, and the rhythm of the poem now has an internal as well as an external structure.
Scholars distinguish two positions:
In Old English poetry — Beowulf, the elegies — the caesura was the single most important formal feature. Each line was built as two half-lines separated by a strong central pause, with alliteration binding them together. The caesura wasn't optional; it was the structural backbone.
Latin hexameter (Virgil, Ovid) relied on caesura just as heavily, typically falling somewhere around the third foot. Without the caesura, the line would collapse into a single long roll of stresses.
In English blank verse, caesura is more flexible. Early pentameter tended to place its caesura predictably after the fourth or sixth syllable. Shakespeare, by his mature period, distributes the pause anywhere in the line — sometimes very early, sometimes very late, sometimes twice in the same line.
The famous opening of Hamlet's soliloquy — "To be, or not to be: that is the question" — has a caesura right at the colon. The line divides into a two-part question. The shift of the caesura within otherwise regular pentameter is one of Shakespeare's main rhythmic expressive tools.
The mature pentameter line uses both: a caesura inside the line and enjambment at its end. The result is a line whose internal grammar keeps the voice moving while the visible line shape disciplines it. (See our entry on enjambment.) The combination is one of the reasons English blank verse has been the default for serious poetry for four centuries.
Read a passage of Milton or late Shakespeare aloud. Mark the place in each line where your voice naturally wants to pause. That place, wherever it is, is the caesura. The variation of where it falls from line to line is what gives the verse its conversational fluency under its formal frame.
When a critic talks about a poem's caesurae, they are pointing at the internal architecture of the line. Look for the pauses inside the lines, not just at their ends. Where the caesura falls, and how it moves, often tells you how a poet is using meter as a flexible instrument rather than a fixed grid.
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