Leonine verse is a type of poetry style that uses an internal rhyme. This means a word in one part of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the line. It was often used in Latin poetry during the European Middle Ages. The spread of this type of rhyme, which was rare in earlier Latin poetry, is usually linked to a monk named Leonius. He is believed to have written a history of the Old Testament called Historia Sacra, which is kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. Some scholars think Leonius might be the same person as Leoninus, a Benedictine musician from the 12th century. If this is true, Leoninus would not have been the first person to use this style of poetry.

In English, Leonine verse is sometimes called "jangling verse" by 19th-century scholars and critics. They thought it was silly, rough, and a poor copy of classical literature. William Shakespeare used this style in a song sung by Caliban in his play The Tempest.

Examples

Leonine verses from Virgil's Eclogues, Book 8, line 80, dated 39 B.C.:

Leonine verses from Ovid's Metamorphoses, written around A.D. 8:

Leonine verses found on the tomb of the Venerable Bede in the Gallee Chapel of Durham Cathedral, possibly from the 8th century:

Leonine verses in a mosaic on top of the marble ciborio in the Chiesa di Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli:

Leonine verses by Marbodius of Rennes, from his work De Lapidibus, around 1040:

Leonine verses in half rhyme in the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello, around 1100:

Leonine verses in mosaic in the apse of the Cathedral of Cefalù, around 1150:

Leonine verses in the Portale dell'abbazia di Leno dell'abate Gunterio, in the year 1200:

A well-known poem using tripart Leonine rhyme is De Contemptu Mundi by Bernard of Cluny. The first book of this poem begins:

As this example shows, tripartite dactylic hexameter rhyming couplets (lines divided into three parts) can create internal rhymes in Leonine verse. These rhymes do not always occur at the end of a line but may instead be based on dividing the line into three sections.

In 1893, the American composer Horatio Parker composed a musical piece called Hora novissima as part of his cantata of the same name.

The epitaph of Count Alan Rufus, dated by Richard Sharpe and others to 1093, is described by André Wilmart as being written in Leonine hexameter:

Leonine rhyme is often used in English-language poetry.

An example of Leonine rhyme in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 2 (1611), appears in a drunken song sung by Caliban:

Leonine verses were used by Edward Lear in his humorous poem The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (1870):