Internal rhyme

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In poetry, internal rhyme, or middle rhyme, is rhyme which occurs in a single line of verse.

Internal rhyme occurs in the middle of a line, as in these lines from Coleridge, "In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud" or "Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white" ("The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), or in "Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December" from "The Raven" by Edgar Poe. Internal rhyme is also used extensively in modern rap and hip-hop music, being pioneered by Rakim in the 1980s.^[1]^[2]

The comic "Bantams in Pine Woods" by Wallace Stevens consistently uses internal rhyme:

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.