Interlaced Rhyme
Quick answer: Interlaced rhyme places rhymes mid-line across neighbouring lines, so words at each caesura chime together. Learn how poets weave this internal pattern.
Interlaced rhyme is a pattern in which a word in the middle of one line rhymes with a word in the middle of the next, typically at each line's caesura, so the rhymes weave through the interior of the verse rather than sitting at the ends. Picture two long lines laid side by side: their final words may rhyme in the usual way, while their midpoint words carry a second, quieter rhyme of their own. That doubled weave is the interlacing.
The device flourishes in long-lined verse, where each line has a natural pause and therefore a natural mid-line position to rhyme from. It rewards listeners more than readers, since the ear picks up the interior chime even when the eye, scanning for end-words, misses it.
How It Works
Each long line breaks at a pause, and the words before those pauses rhyme across lines. An original pair: We stood in the rain by the ruined mill, and the water ran cold; we talked of the lane where the elms once grew, and of growing old. Rain and lane chime at the two caesuras, while cold and old close the ends, giving the couplet a woven double music.
In effect, interlacing turns one long couplet into a hidden quatrain. Split each line at its pause and you would see a small ABAB stanza, which is why some prosodists treat interlaced rhyme in long lines and cross rhyme in short ones as the same creature wearing different clothes.
Where You Will See It
Swinburne, the great Victorian sound-engineer, laced internal rhymes through his galloping anapaests until whole stanzas shimmer. Medieval Latin and Old Norse verse used related mid-line rhyme schemes, and Celtic traditions, especially Welsh strict-metre poetry with its cynghanedd, developed interior sound-matching into a formal system far stricter than anything English attempted. Hopkins, who studied Welsh, carried some of that interior chiming into his own lines. Song lyricists use interlacing constantly, because melody makes mid-line rhymes easy to hear.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Work in lines of at least five beats, so each half-line has room to be a phrase. Write the couplet plainly first, then revise the pre-pause words into rhyming partners; retrofitting usually beats forcing the weave in a first draft.
Do not feel obliged to interlace every pair. Two or three woven couplets in a longer poem create a passage of heightened music, a place where the poem audibly gathers itself, which is often more effective than an unbroken pattern.
What poets can take from this
- Use long lines with clear caesuras; interlacing suffocates in short lines.
- Draft the sense first, then revise the mid-line words into rhyme during a second pass.
- Keep interior rhymes slightly quieter than end rhymes, or the line splits in half.
- Try interlacing just one stanza of a poem to mark its emotional peak.
- Read Swinburne aloud to hear how far the technique can go before it tips into excess.
Try it yourself
Write three couplets in lines of six beats about a river in flood, rhyming the ends conventionally and interlacing a second rhyme at the caesuras, then rewrite the same couplets without the interlacing and compare which version moves faster.
Questions
What is the difference between interlaced rhyme and internal rhyme?
Internal rhyme covers any rhyme involving a mid-line word, including rhymes within a single line. Interlaced rhyme is a specific weave: mid-line words rhyming with mid-line words in neighbouring lines, usually at the caesura.
Is interlaced rhyme the same as leonine rhyme?
No. Leonine rhyme happens inside one line, pairing the word before the pause with the line's own final word. Interlaced rhyme reaches across lines, pairing pause-words in one line with pause-words in the next.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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