Eurydice

A poet creates an enjambment when they have a sentence that runs across two or more lines. Vuong enjambs every line in "Eurydice." Movement and time play an essential role in "Eurydice." Vuong opens the poem by comparing an arrowhead striking a doe and a day's end. The second sentence features the speaker and their companion traveling through a garden, where the fire appears far away. These images evoke or directly convey distance and people moving from one point to another. The enjambment reflects this as it pulls the reader onto the following line to learn what happens. The reader feels like they are traveling alongside the speaker as the sentence travels from one position on the page to another place.

Enjambment makes the sentence's experience seem to unfold over time. If the event happened in one line, it risks feeling like a recap or a brief moment that quickly occurs before the speaker moves on to the next event. Enjambment helps establish continuity so that every image and event in the poem becomes a cohesive narrative.

While Vuong does not use meter or rhyme, he does use a visual technique called dropped lines. This form of enjambment is when the poet places an initial line in a regular place on the page but then indents the following line. The result creates a gap within the line, sentence, or stanza. For example, Vuong begins the book version of "Eurydice" with:

It’s more like the sound

                   a doe makes

when the arrowhead

                    replaces the day (Lines 1-4).

Vuong continues the pattern of un-indented-indented lines through the rest of the poem as it appears in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. However, it is important to note that "Eurydice" lacks the dropped lines on The Nation website, where it first appeared in print. Since the book came out two years after The Nation published "Eurydice," the dropped lines version appears to be the official, finalized version of the poem.

The dropped lines lend to the feeling that the reader travels with the speaker as they read the poem. Like points on a map, the lines seem to jump from one place to another. The dropped lines also visually evoke a sense of distance. The speaker travels through the poem, at one point even noting that the fire appears only as "a pink brushstroke" because of their distance from it (Line 10). The speaker also discusses mental and interpersonal distance. While they and their companion know the day is ending, they do not stop traveling since their location makes the leaves seem still illuminated by the sun. As a result, they lose track of time.

The pattern of dropped lines resembles a mountain range or the openings of caves. The visual subtly refers to the Eurydice and Orpheus myth since the couple escaped the underworld through a cave. However, Eurydice cannot return to the living when Orpheus breaks the rules. The dropped lines could represent the couples' journey outside of and return to the underworld. It also creates a cycle they cannot break. The dropped lines invoke subjugation, making "gravity breaking / our kneecaps" (Lines 20-21) literal.