query on poetic figure

[Jesse Sheidlower]

According to the beloved _Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics_, it's called a "broken rhyme" (sometimes apparently
also called "split rhyme"). Some examples from non-comic poems
include G. M. Hopkins' "The Windhover":

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

and John Donne's "Satire IV":

Before he scapt, So'it pleas'd my destinie
(Guilty'of my sin of going,) to thinke me
As prone to'all ill, and of good as forget-
full, as proud, as lustfull, and as much in debt,
As vaine, as witlesse, and as false as they
Which dwell at Court, for once going that way.

Arnold, please don't leave!

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 08:43:21PM -0700, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> i feel really stupid asking this, but at the moment i can't recall the name of the well-known poetic figure in which a word is split between two lines.  it's often done in songs, to get a rhyme or to set up a temporary ambiguity ("She got pinched in the As / Tor Bar", "Which only goes to show why I'm a broad / Shouldered guy"), but it can also be done to throw emphasis on the material at the end of the first line or the material at the beginning of the second, or for other reasons, as in the mini-poem i posted here:
>
> http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/mini-poem/
>
> where
>
>   tetra
>     metrical
>
> and
>
>   trocha
>     icity
>
> are both split, for, well, metrical reasons.
>
> surprisingly hard to search for if you don't have a clue about the term.
>
> arnold
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org