what is a caesura

A caesura is a pause or break in the middle of a line of verse, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary such as a phrase or clause. It is a feature of verse, not prose, but it is not exclusively restricted to poetry. A caesura can be marked as || in the middle of the line, although generally, it is not marked at all – it’s simply part of the way the reader or singer pronounces the line. The plural of “caesura” is “caesurae,” and it means “cut” in Latin. There are three types of caesurae based on where they appear in the line: initial, medial, and terminal. In poetry that uses meter, each caesura is defined as "masculine" or "feminine" depending on whether the pause comes after a stressed or unstressed syllable. The use of caesurae allows writers to formulate their thoughts and images using more complex sentence structures with different clauses and a freer use of punctuation than is possible.