Everything about Leonine Verse totally explained
Leonine verse is a type of
versification based on
internal rhyme, and commonly used in
Latin verse of the European Middle Ages. The invention of such conscious rhymes, foreign to 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. This "history" is composed in Latin verses, all of which rhyme in the center. It is possible that this Leonius is the same person as
Leoninus, a
Benedictine musician of the
twelfth century, in which case he wouldn't have been the original inventor of the form.
Another very famous poem in Leonine rhyme is the
De Contemptu Mundi of
Bernard of Cluny, whose first book begins:
» Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt — vigilemus.
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus.
Imminet imminet ut mala terminet, æqua coronet,
Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, æthera donet.
:(These are the last days, the worst of times: let us keep watch. Behold the menacing arrival of the supreme Judge. He is coming, he's coming to end evil, crown the just, reward the right, set the worried free, and give the skies.)
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 don't necessarily involve the end of the line at all.
Further Information
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