~ The Poet's Place Cafe~

Lewis Turco in The Book of Forms says head rhyme can be "construed as head alliteration" with each line beginning with the same consonant.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and the Complete Rhyming Dictionary by Clement Wood do not address head rhyme at all, even though they both have pages of definitions and examples of many different types of rhyme and sound devices used in poetry.

If alliteration is the key then I would think it would be a sound-based choice.

My understanding has been that head rhyme is the repetition at the beginning of each line with the same beginning consonant and vowel sound, the first half of that matches with Turco's definition, I guess the next half is just a bonus. But I don't know what my original source was.

There are forms that specify first syllable or first word rhyme and refer to it as head rhyme but I think that is just a loose interpretation of the term. The first syllable or the first word does "head" the line.

A wise one once said, "in poetry no rules, just tools". The content comes first, the craft or delivery second. In this forum it is a forms challenge and therefore the "elements" do matter, but the content should never suffer just to comply with a specific rhyme pattern.

~~Tink