A detail of a watercolor by Augustus Hare showing the Latin Leonine verse inscribed on Bede's tomb.
Leonine verse is a type of versification based on an internal rhyme between a word within the line before a caesura and a word at the end, and commonly used in Latin verse of the European Middle Ages. The proliferation of such conscious rhymes, uncommon in Classical Latin poetry, is traditionally attributed to a probably apocryphal monk Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament (Historia Sacra) preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. It is possible that this Leonius is the same person as Leoninus, a Benedictine musician of the twelfth century, in which case he would not have been the original proliferator of the form.
In English Leonine verse is sometimes referred to disparagingly as "jangling verse", for example by 19th-century antiquaries and classical purists, who considered it absurd, coarse, and a corruption of and offensive to the high ideals of classical literature. William Shakespeare used it in a drunken song sung by Caliban in The Tempest.
Formula virtutis Maris astrum, Porta salutis Prole Maria levat quos conjuge subdidit Eva Sum deus atq[ue] caro patris et sum matris imago non piger ad lapsum set flentis p[ro]ximus adsum[5]
HAEC NON LENENSIS TELLUS FERTUR LEONENSIS CUI NON LENONES NOMEN POSUERE LEONES FORMA LEONINA SIGNANS BIS MARMORA BINA DICITUR OFFERRE LOCA VOCE NON AUTEM RE FELIX EST NOMEN FELIX EST NOMINIS OMEN QUOD NON LENONES POSUERUNT IMMO LEONES[7]
Another very famous poem in a tripart Leonine rhyme is the De Contemptu Mundi of Bernard of Cluny, whose first book begins:
Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus: Ecce minaciter, imminet arbiter, ille supremus. Imminet imminet, ut mala terminet, æqua coronet, Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, æthera donet.
(These current days are the worst of times: let us keep watch. Behold the menacing arrival of the Supreme Judge. He is coming, He is coming to end evil, crown the just, reward the right, set the worried free and grant eternal life.)
As this example of tripartiti dactylici caudati (dactylic hexameter rhyming couplets divided into three) shows, the internal rhymes of leonine verse may be based on tripartition of the line (as opposed to a caesura in the center of the verse) and do not necessarily involve the end of the line at all.
In 1893, the American composer Horatio Parker set the Hora novissima to music in his cantata of the same name.
^Peck, Harry Thurston (1896). "Rhyme". Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. Vol. 2. New York: American Book Company. p. 1,377. Retrieved September 24, 2024.
^Pietro Zani, Enciclopedia metodica critico-ragionata delle belle arti: dell' abate D. Piero Zani, Fidentino. Parma: Tipografia ducale, 1817, pt. 1, vol. 8, p. 161 (on-line)
^Poesia latina medievale, introduzione, testi, traduzione, note, trascrizioni musicali a cura di Giuseppe Vecchi. Parma 1959, p. 522
^Renato Polacco, La cattedrale di Torcello, Venezia 1984, p. 52
^Demus O., The Mosaics of Norman Sicily, London, 1945, pp. 4-5
^Francesco Antonio Zaccaria, Dell'antichissima badia di Leno, Venezia 1767, p. 35
^Epitaph of Alan Rufus as recorded in Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 297, published in Thomas Arnold, 1890, Memorials of St. Edmund's Abbey, London: Printed for H.M. Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, p. 350.
