Broken rhyme


Broken rhyme, also called split rhyme, is a form of rhyme. It is produced by dividing a word at the line break of a poem to make a rhyme with the end word of another line. Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem The Windhover, for example, divides the word "kingdom" at the end of the first line to rhyme with the word "wing" ending the fourth line. Hopkins is rare in using the device in serious poems. More commonly, the device is used in comic or playful poetry, as in the sixth stanza of Edward Lear's "How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear" or in Elizabeth Bishop's "Pink Dog":
Here, the word "nightgown" has been split over the third and fourth lines so that the first and third lines form a tail rhyme.
Singer-songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer occasionally used broken rhymes for comedic effect, such as in the opening lines of "We Will All Go Together When We Go":
Here, the word "adjective" has been split over the fifth and sixth line to rhyme with "tragic".
Note that the expression "sooner or later" has also been split down the middle, but with no word-division, between the second and third line. This is a closely related poetry device called enjambement.