Half rhyme

Half rhyme or slant rhyme, sometimes called near rhyme or imperfect rhyme,^[1] is consonance on the final letters of the words involved (e.g. ill with shell). Many slant rhymes are also eye rhyme.

The following example uses alternating half rhymes (on/moon, bodies/ladies):

When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies

(Yeats, "Lines written in Dejection")

American poet Emily Dickinson also used half rhyme frequently in her works.^[2] In her poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" the half rhyme appears in the second and fourth lines. In the following example the rhyme is soul/all.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

Moses ibn Ezra, 12th century Hebrew poet and poetry theoretician, terms the practice of poets to use half-rhyme "donkey-rhyming."^{[citation needed]}

References

^ http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_S.html
^ Lilia Melani (February 24, 2009), Emily Dickinson: An Overview, Department of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, retrieved 2009-06-22

[1] ttp://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_S.html

[2] Lilia Melani (February 24, 2009), Emily Dickinson: An Overview, Department of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, retrieved 2009-06-22

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See also

References