Leonine, adj.
[_]
Unlike a menagerie lion. Leonine verses are those in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end, as in this famous passage from Bella Peeler Silcox:
[The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades]
The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: “O tempora! O mores!”
It should be explained that Mrs. Silcox
does not undertake to teach the pronunciation
of the Greek and Latin tongues. Leonine
verses are so called in honor of a poet
named Leo, whom prosodists appear to find
a pleasure in believing to have been the first
to discover that a rhyming couplet could be
run into a single line.
