Leonine verse is a type of versification based on an internal rhyme between a word within the line before a caesura and a word at the end, and commonly used in Latin verse of the European Middle Ages. The proliferation of such conscious rhymes, uncommon in Classical Latin poetry, is traditionally attributed to a probably apocryphal monk Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament (Historia Sacra) preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. It is possible that this Leonius is the same person as Leoninus, a Benedictine musician of the twelfth century, in which case he would not have been the original proliferator of the form.
In English Leonine verse is sometimes referred to disparagingly as "jangling verse", for example by 19th-century antiquaries and classical purists, who considered it absurd, coarse, and a corruption of and offensive to the high ideals of classical literature. William Shakespeare used it in a drunken song sung by Caliban in The Tempest.
Leonine verses from Virgil's Eclogues 8.80 (39 B.C.):
Leonine verses from Ovid's Metamorphoses (A.D. 8):
Leonine verses from the tomb of the Venerable Bede in the Gallee Chapel of Durham Cathedral, possibly from the 8th century:
Leonine verses in the mosaic on top of the marble ciborio in the :
Leonine verses by Marbodius of Rennes, De Lapidibus, around 1040:
Leonine verses in half rhyme in the in Torcello, around 1100:
Leonine verses in mosaic in the apse of the , around 1150:
Leonine verses in the dell'abate Gunterio, in the year 1200:
Another very famous poem in a tripart Leonine rhyme is the De Contemptu Mundi of Bernard of Cluny, whose first book begins:
As this example of tripartiti dactylici caudati (dactylic hexameter rhyming couplets divided into three) shows, the internal rhymes of leonine verse may be based on tripartition of the line (as opposed to a caesura in the center of the verse) and do not necessarily involve the end of the line at all.
In 1893, the American composer Horatio Parker set the Hora novissima to music in 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 in Leonine hexameter:
Leonine rhyme is common in English-language verse.
A Leonine rhyme in Shakespeare's The Tempest 2:2 (1611), sung in a drunken song by Caliban:
Leonine verses used by Edward Lear in his humorous poem "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" (1870):