initial rhyme

See beginning rhyme.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Noun

initial rhyme - use of the same consonant at the beginning of each stressed syllable in a line of verse; "around the rock the ragged rascal ran"

alliteration, beginning rhyme, head rhyme

rhyme, rime - correspondence in the sounds of two or more lines (especially final sounds)

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

It does not always stand at the end of the line: one finds initial rhyme alongside end rhyme, and internal ("middle") rhyme, even though the placement at the end of a line claims greater compositional meaning, since end rhyme designates (serves as a marker of) the line's boundary, and likewise its structural relationship to the remaining lines (the stanzaic structure).

Introduction to rhyme: its history and theory

In the case of Pearl this means not only end-rhyme, but also alliteration or initial rhyme and refrain with link word.

Rhyme, the icons of sound, and the Middle English 'Pearl.'(Rhetoric and Poetics)

Rhyme is also distinguished according to its position in the poem as follows: end rhyme, in which the rhyme occurs at the ends of lines; internal rhyme, in which at least one rhyme occurs within the line (as in Wilde's " Each narrow cell in which we dwell " ); initial rhyme, in which the rhyme occurs as the first word or syllable of the line; cross rhyme, in which the rhyme occurs at the end of one line and in the middle of the next; and random rhyme, in which the rhymes seem to occur accidentally in any combination of the foregoing, often mixed with unrhymed lines.

Rhyme

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