Dear companion of our youth when we were immortal 1 and our happy shouts swung up through the gumtrees,
when we raced go-carts in order to destroy our knees,
when there were always eight of us at home for tea
and eight of us learning to count and read 5
and eight of us crammed into the Fiat for Mass
and eight of us slashing through the long dry grass
and four of you dive-bombing four of us
and all of us playing ‘Red rover, red rover, come over!’

Hello. This question is incomplete. The full question is:

Stanza one is one long sentence and contains many instances of enjambment. What is the effect of this on the rhythm? How does this contribute to the meaning of the poem?

Dear companion of our youth when we were immortal 1

and our happy shouts swung up through the gumtrees,

when we raced go-carts in order to destroy our knees,

when there were always eight of us at home for tea

and eight of us learning to count and read 5

and eight of us crammed into the Fiat for Mass

and eight of us slashing through the long dry grass

and four of you dive-bombing four of us

and all of us playing ‘Red rover, red rover, come over!’

Enjambment slows down the pace as if it were being interrupted and paused briefly. This contributes to the meaning of the poem because it emphasizes the most important terms within the poem, constructing the phrases in such a way that these terms stand out.

Explanation:

The verse of the poem, shown above, presents several enjambement, which is a literary resource, widely used in poetry, which aims to end a verse of the poem in disagreement with the syntax that that verse should have, that is, the verse ends in disagreement with what the grammar establishes for the construction of the sentence. When a poet does this, it means that he is trying to highlight terms that would not be highlighted with grammatically correct writing.

In the poem above, we can see an example of this in the verses "Dear companion of our youth when we were immortal / and our happy shouts swung up through the gumtrees" where the author makes two lines of a sentence that should be a single line. The author did this to highlight the "happy shouts" that would not be highlighted if written with the correct syntax.

conversing outside - a.

following gollum to the back entrance