Pararhyme
Quick answer: Pararhyme is double consonant rhyme where consonants match but vowels change, as in blade and blood. Learn how Wilfred Owen made it the sound of war poetry.
Pararhyme is a form of near rhyme in which the consonant frame of a word repeats while the vowel inside it changes: 'blade' and 'blood', 'leaves' and 'lives', 'hall' and 'hell'. Both the opening and closing consonant sounds match, so the words feel like the same shape sung on a different note. The term was coined by the critic Edmund Blunden to describe Wilfred Owen's practice, and Owen remains its defining master.
Where ordinary slant rhyme merely softens the chime, pararhyme actively unsettles it. The matched consonants promise identity, the shifted vowel breaks the promise, and the effect on the ear is a kind of controlled wrongness, which is exactly why Owen chose it for poems about the trenches.
How It Works
Take a consonant skeleton, b...d, and change the vowel inside: bad, bed, bide, bode. Rhyme two of them and the ear registers kinship and estrangement at once. An invented couplet: 'He kept the photograph inside his coat, / and thumbed its corners smooth on the long night out.' 'Coat' and 'out' share the closing t while the vowels pull apart; the couplet refuses to close sweetly, and that refusal is the mood.
Vowel direction matters. Owen tended to move from a higher, brighter vowel to a lower, darker one across the pair, so each rhyme is a small fall: hall to hell, grained to ground. Reverse the direction and the pair lifts instead.
Where You Will See It
Owen's 'Strange Meeting' is the canonical showcase, built on couplets whose rhymes are all pararhymes; readers consistently describe its sound as haunted, an underworld where nothing resolves. His 'Exposure' and 'Miners' work the same seam. Before Owen, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins had experimented with consonantal echo, and Welsh cynghanedd, with its intricate consonant patterning, offers an older cousin.
After Owen, the device passed into the mainstream of modern rhyme: W. H. Auden used pararhyme constantly in his early poems, and Seamus Heaney's off-rhymes often match consonant frames in the Owen manner.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose pararhyme when resolution would be a lie: war, illness, estrangement, aftermath. Build pairs by fixing the consonant frame first, then hunting vowels: write down a word's skeleton (l...ght) and run vowels through it (light, fought is close but not exact; light, late shares only part). Precision matters, because the effect depends on both consonants genuinely matching.
Consider vowel direction as an expressive choice, darkening pairs for grief, brightening ones for fragile hope. In a contest poem, a consistent pararhyme scheme signals a deliberate sound design, and judges scoring language notice a poet who can make wrongness musical.
What poets can take from this
- Match both the opening and closing consonant sounds; one match alone is ordinary slant rhyme.
- Darken the vowel across the pair (hall to hell) for grief; brighten it for lift.
- Sustain pararhyme through a whole poem when the subject forbids resolution.
- Build pairs by writing the consonant skeleton and cycling vowels through it.
- Read Owen's 'Strange Meeting' aloud once to fix the sound of full pararhyme couplets in your ear.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of six couplets about returning to a place that no longer matches your memory of it. Rhyme every couplet with strict pararhyme, matching opening and closing consonants while shifting the vowel, and let the vowels darken as the poem proceeds.
Questions
What is the difference between pararhyme and slant rhyme?
Slant rhyme is the broad family of partial sound matches, often just shared final consonants. Pararhyme is a strict subtype where the consonants both before and after the vowel match while the vowel changes, as in 'blade' and 'blood'.
Who invented pararhyme?
No one poet invented consonant rhyme, and Dickinson, Hopkins and Welsh tradition all anticipated it, but Wilfred Owen systematised it in his war poems, and the word itself was coined by Edmund Blunden to describe Owen's technique.
Is pararhyme the same as consonance?
They are close relatives. Consonance is any repetition of consonant sounds, anywhere in words or lines. Pararhyme is consonance organised into rhyme position: paired line endings whose full consonant frames match around different vowels.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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