I wouldn't avoid either caesura or enjambment. And not to worry about all caesuras at the end. They work well all through poems. Early in the line, middle, even end.

Check out Chaucer's prologue to The Canterbury Tales:

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;


There are the caesuras in the middle of the line after Aprille, Marche and engendred (although there's a touch of desire to place it BEFORE engendred. And notice how And bathed every veyne in swich licour, rockets through to completion at the end. No caesuras in that line. It's an express train.

Speaking of express trains, Tennyson's translation of The Battle of Brunanburh roars along like a juggernaut, all thanks to not having caesuras until the line ends:

Athelstan King
Lord among earls
Bracelet-bestower and
Baron of Barons
He with his Brother,
Eadmund aetheling,


Boy! that's a Nantucket sleighride if I ever heard one. But Tennyson wanted to carry the vocal qualities of the scops' Anglo-Saxon oral style over into his modern era. I'd love to hear Michael Dorn read this in the style that he used to portray Lt. Worf on ST-The Next Generations. But the caesuras all come at the end of the lines except one which appears in the middle, there where "and" enjambs over to "Baron".

Yeah for enjambment -- that modern poets would pay attention to this use of it -- to carry the moment into the next line.

Yah! something we've lost with free verse, I think. The ability to create drama by manipulating the speed of the read. Go back, be angry, and shout those lines from Tennyson. Or, go shout the whole thing: www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/brunanburh/brun.html -- just don't let the neighbors hear you.

But the caesuras are STRONG in this one, as opposed to soft in Chaucer's work. Hmmm. Maybe because the language had been Normanised before Geoff wrote as opposed to the pure Anglo-Saxon quality that Tennyson translated?

Ahhh. Wheee! Fun with meter. I can recommend the Poem in Motion chapter of John Ciardi's excellent book, How Does A Poem Mean?, which you can find online everywhere from Amazon to EBay. Mine's ancient, dog-eared and I'm at least the fourth owner of it, and have had it for more than 30 years. The rest of the book is pretty darned good, too.

Gaer