narrative rhythm, sound and sense 297in characters = syllables in stanza 1: 11-10-10-9-20-17-8-11-5-16-3-2.
If we do take lineation into account, the longest phrase has 14 char-
acters. The stanza-final phrases of five, three and two characters are
conspicuous in their brevity. Combining the character count and
punctuation patterns with the stanza’s syntax, we find that of these
three, the middle one is closely linked to the preceding 16-character
phrase, justifying emphatic pauses around the five- and two-character
phrases in lines 7 and 8. Again, there is a connection with the poem’s
content, in that both phrases, he sees you and confusion, have a high spe-
cific gravity in the stanza. This connection is reaffirmed if we include
short phrases with line breaks instead of punctuation as their right
boundary, in lines 2, 4 and 7. In linear order, the short phrases build a
content skeleton for the stanza and the poem: you see [the scene]... you
see [him]... he sees you... you and he know... this means... confusion.
We have noted that Sun Wenbo employs enjambment. In this re-
spect, as in others, «The Program» is representative of large parts of
his oeuvre. Only a third of the line breaks in the poem coincide with
the completion of a sentence, always marked by punctuation. For all
line breaks in the other two thirds of the text, from the viewpoint of
syntax we must read on. There are three degrees of enjambment. The
first, accompanied by punctuation (nine cases), is that exemplified in
lines 5-6 of stanza 2: You, / brandishing the sword. The second degree of
enjambment (27 cases, or more than one third of the full text) is seen,
for instance, in lines 1-2 of stanza 1: you see / a fiction of night and in lines
7-8 of the seventh: strides into / a small wine shop. The line break inter-
rupts the sentence, but respects the integrity of noun and verb phrases.
We find enjambment to the third degree where the line break also
cuts through the middle of a (compound) noun phrase or verb phrase
(12 cases), as in lines 1-2 of stanza 2: the audience’s / line and lines 3-4
of stanza 5: a quarrel / arises (in the original, a four-character inchoa-
tive verb compound, one word broken in two: ѝਉ / 䍋ᴹ). Last but
not least, there is a conspicuous case of enjambment bridging a stanza
division (between stanzas 4 and 5): Thereupon, // the crowd sees...
Enjambment is remarkably frequent, to where run-on lines be-
come the default mode. As a result, end-stopped lines with breaks that
coincide with the punctuated completion of a sentence gain in empha-
sis and finality, a typical example being the poem’s last sentence and
closing statement: You now think that whatever you lay your hands on is just
that. Conversely, sentence-final lineation is systematically undermined.