The pause occurring at the end of a line is equally regular with the medial pause, and corresponds in the same way to a phrase-pause in music. It is an element of the same character, then, as the cesura, though not bearing the same name. It coincides less closely than the cesura with syntactical and rhetorical pauses. When there is no corresponding syntactical or rhetorical pause at the end of the line (in other words, when the metrical pause marking the end of the verse cannot be prominently represented in reading without interfering with the expression of the sense), the line is said to be "run-on." Such an ending is also called enjambement. The importance of this distinction between "end-stopped" and "run-on" lines will appear in the notes on the Decasyllabic Couplet and Blank Verse, in Part Two.
(b) Pauses filling the time of syllables.
A second class of silent time-intervals, or pauses, is to be distinguished from the cesural pause by the fact that in this case the time of the pause is counted in the metrical scheme. Pauses of this class correspond to rests in music; and as in the case of such rests, their occurrence is exceptional.
Of fustian he wered a gipoun
‸ Al bismotered with his habergeoun.
For him was lever have at his beddes heed
‸ Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed.
(Chaucer: Prologue to Canterbury Tales, 75 f. and 293 f.)
This omission of the first light syllable is characteristic of Chaucer's couplet and of Middle English verse generally. (See Schipper, vol. i. p. 462, and ten Brink's Chaucer's Sprache und Verskunst, p. 175.) In modern verse it is not usually permitted.
The time doth pass, ‸ yet shall not my love.
(Wyatt: The joy so short, alas!)
The omitted syllable following the medial pause is closely parallel to that at the beginning of the verse.