Broken Rhyme
Quick answer: Broken rhyme splits a word across a line break so its first half can rhyme, a daring effect used by Hopkins and comic poets. Learn how and when to try it.
Broken rhyme is the splitting of a single word across a line break so that part of it can carry a rhyme: the line ends mid-word, usually with a hyphen, and the stranded syllables complete themselves on the next line. Rhyming 'behold her' with the first half of a broken 'boulder-' would be the move. It is one of the most conspicuous things a poet can do with a line ending, since it fractures the very unit rhyme normally seals.
Poets reach for it in two moods: comic verse, where the audible cheat is the joke, and high-intensity lyric, where the snapped word enacts strain, breathlessness or breakage. Either way it announces that the line break is an instrument, not just a margin.
How It Works
The rhyme falls on a syllable that only exists as a rhyme because the word was cut. An invented example: 'We hauled the nets in, singing, / and did not see the light- / ning split the mast. The ringing / came later, then the night.' 'Light-' rhymes cleanly with 'night' only because 'lightning' has been broken over the line; the snap in the word arrives at the exact moment the mast snaps.
The device works best when the fracture means something. A word broken for no reason but the rhyme reads as desperation; a word broken where the poem itself breaks reads as design.
Where You Will See It
Gerard Manley Hopkins is the patron saint: in 'The Windhover' he ends a line on 'king-' and completes 'kingdom' on the next, letting the majesty of the word literally overflow the line. His sonnets break words at moments of ecstatic overload. On the comic side, Byron, Hood and later light-verse writers split words for outrageous rhymes, and Ogden Nash made the mangled line ending a signature.
Contemporary poets use unhyphenated versions too, breaking compounds or splitting words across stanzas to slow the reader; once you look, e e cummings' fractured words are broken rhyme's free-verse cousins.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Use it seldom and mean it. One broken rhyme in a poem is an event; three are a tic. Break at a syllable boundary the voice can actually pause on, and place the fracture where the poem's content is also fracturing: a snapped rope, an interrupted sentence, a caught breath. In comic verse, do the opposite: break words shamelessly and let the reader hear you getting away with it.
Contest judges reading for structure will forgive audacity sooner than accident, so make sure the rest of the poem's craft signals that you knew exactly what you were doing.
What poets can take from this
- Break words only at natural syllable joints so the mouth can make the turn.
- Let the split coincide with a break in the poem's action or feeling.
- Use a hyphen at the line end so readers see the fracture is deliberate.
- In comic verse, choose the most respectable word possible to mangle; the collision of registers is the laugh.
- Limit yourself to one broken rhyme per short poem; scarcity is what gives it voltage.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about something snapping, a rope, a resolution, a signal, in rhymed quatrains. Exactly once, break a word over a line ending so its first syllable carries the rhyme, and place that break at the instant the snap happens.
Questions
What is the difference between broken rhyme and enjambment?
Enjambment runs a sentence past the line break but keeps every word whole. Broken rhyme cuts an individual word in two at the break, usually so part of it can rhyme. Enjambment bends the line; broken rhyme fractures the word.
Is broken rhyme the same as split rhyme?
The terms are often used interchangeably. Some writers use split rhyme for the related trick of building one rhyme from several words (also called mosaic rhyme), so it is worth checking which effect a given book means.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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