Abstract In many respects Latin poetry deviates from the linguistic norms of prose; such deviations are often attributed to non-linguistic factors, with the result that the language of Latin poetry is more often studied by literary scholars than by linguists. A frequent poetic phenomenon are discontinuous adjective-noun phrases, which tend to be explained by appeal to various artistic considerations. The present contribution argues that syntactic discontinuity in poetry is not arbitrary, but is subject to linguistic constraints, which are largely the same as in prose. By scrutinising 120 non-discontinuous adjective-noun phrases in the Ciris (out of a total of 531 adjective-noun phrases), it is demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of such phrases fall into a number of specific syntactic and semantic categories, while outside these categories discontinuity appears to be the rule.