Slant Rhyme

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Slant rhyme, also known as half-rhyme, is defined by The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms as the following:

"A form of rhyme in which words contain similar sounds but do not rhyme perfectly. Most half-rhyme (also called approximate rhyme, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, pararhyme, and slant rhyme) is the result of either consonance or assonance, usually the former. Half-rhyme may be unintentional or intentional. Unintentional half-rhyme results from the poet's lack of rhyming skills; intentional half-rhyme is usually the product of poetic license, liberties taken by the poet to create specific sound effects."

Examples could include the words lost/test, penny/worry, and so on.

From the poems we have read so far this semester, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" is a very good example of calculated (seemingly) slant rhyme. His poem, which follows an ABABABCC rhyme scheme, seems to have just as many slant rhymes as it does pure rhymes.

Take lines 1-4, for example:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
-- Those dying generations -- at their song, 
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas

We see in lines 1 and 3 Yeats's manipulation of the final consonant sound of a word in order to create a successful slant rhyme. The words young and song do not rhyme perfectly, but create a similar sound as they both end in the sound -ng. This same technique is used later, in lines 12-14:

For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence

Dress and magnifincence are even less similar than the example of young/song, but the hard aspirated -s sound at the end of each word creates a slant rhyme in this part of the stanza.

Click the following link for more examples of slant rhyme: The Linguistic Phenomenon of Eye Rhyme

Laurelrose 20:49, 31 January 2007 (EST)