Home › Glossary › Letter P

Peripheral run-on

Structure
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A technique in which a line's sense overruns its expected endpoint, creating a forward thrust that destabilizes closure and heightens anticipation.

Detailed Definition
Peripheral run-on is a syntactic device in which a grammatical unit—such as a clause or phrase—extends beyond the expected boundary of a stanza or section without strong punctuation, yet remains thematically or tonally marginal to the poem’s central argument, creating a sense of overflow, digression, or subconscious leakage; unlike standard enjambment, which propels the main idea forward, peripheral run-on introduces ancillary thoughts that hover at the edges of focus, mimicking the associative drift of memory or the intrusion of the unsaid, thereby complicating the poem’s hierarchy of meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” lines like “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” bleed into the next stanza without punctuation, creating a peripheral run-on that mirrors psychological fragmentation; Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” uses peripheral run-ons across prose-poetry blocks to convey the continuity of racial microaggressions; Whitman’s “Song of Myself” employs peripheral run-ons like “I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume” to dissolve boundaries between self and reader; Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” uses run-ons that drift from memory to present, blurring temporal edges; Peripheral run-ons in Ginsberg’s “Howl” cascade across stanzas, mimicking breathless prophetic utterance.
Additional Notes
Peripheral run-on continues a sentence or phrase beyond expected syntactic closure, often into margins or footnotes. Related to side-note continuation. Creates tension between form and content—note how it challenges reader expectations.
Also Known As
Boundary run-on Margin extension Peripheral continuation Exergual Enjambment
Skip to main content