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Adam: What is the term for words/concepts within a poem that do not rhyme soundwise but which «rhyme» relationally?— 

Dan: relationally?

There isn’t a single universally accepted term that’s the exact semantic equivalent of rhyme, but several concepts come close depending on what you mean:

• Semantic rhyme – Probably the closest informal term. It refers to words or images that “rhyme” through meaning, association, or conceptual affinity rather than sound. This phrase is common in poetry criticism, though it’s not a formal technical term.
• Conceptual rhyme – Also used by poets and critics to describe recurring ideas, symbols, or images that echo one another across a poem.
• Image rhyme or imagistic rhyme – When recurring images (e.g., moon, mirror, water) create a structural correspondence.
• Parallelism – If the relationship is based on repeated structures or analogous ideas rather than sound.
• Motif – If the same concept or image recurs throughout the poem, creating resonance.
• Leitmotif – More common in music and narrative, but sometimes applied to recurring poetic images or ideas.
• Internal echo or thematic echo – Critical terms for repeated conceptual relationships.

Many poets also speak of “rhyming by meaning” or “semantic echoes.” For example:

Stone remembers mountain.
Ash remembers fire.

Here, stone/mountain and ash/fire do not rhyme phonetically, but they form paired conceptual relationships. A critic might say they create a semantic rhyme or conceptual echo.

If you’re thinking of the kind of relational “rhyming” emphasized by poets like Seamus Heaney, Paul Celan, or discussed by Roman Jakobson, semantic rhyme or conceptual rhyme would be the terms most readers would immediately understand, even though they aren’t formal categories like end rhyme or slant rhyme

Adam: yeah, I have always referred to it as «internal rhyme», but I know that that is incorrect. To me such conceptual rhyme can also involve using adverbs or adjectives with similar endings. I often find modern feminine rhyme to be too «sing-song» nursery rhyme. 

Dan: I think you’re putting your finger on something that many poets do experience but that poetics hasn’t given a single canonical name.

“Internal rhyme” is indeed already taken—it refers to sound rhyme within a line, not conceptual relationships.

What you describe seems to combine at least three different kinds of echo:

1. Semantic rhyme – words that are related by meaning or association.
   • ember ↔ memory
   • salt ↔ sea
   • key ↔ lock
2. Morphological rhyme – words sharing endings, prefixes, or grammatical shape without necessarily rhyming in the traditional sense.
   • restless / wordless
   • quietly / secretly
   • becoming / belonging
   This is less about phonetic rhyme than about repeated linguistic architecture. Readers often perceive these patterns subconsciously.
3. Structural or symbolic rhyme – images or situations recurring in analogous positions.
   • A door opening in stanza one; a window opening in stanza six.
   • A bird leaving; a person returning.

The result is a kind of cohesion that isn’t primarily sonic.

Your point about feminine rhyme is interesting. Many contemporary poets deliberately avoid perfect end rhyme because, in English especially, feminine rhyme (“falling/calling”, “river/giver”) can produce exactly that nursery-rhyme effect. Instead they create coherence through these quieter echoes—semantic, morphological, syntactic, and imagistic.

The poet Osip Mandelstam wrote about words attracting one another by meaning and history as much as by sound, and Roman Jakobson argued that poetry is fundamentally built from networks of equivalence, not just phonetic rhyme. So your intuition has a respectable theoretical basis.

I also like your observation about adjectives and adverbs with similar endings. Consider:

silently
patiently
inwardly

They’re not “rhyming” in the conventional sense—the -ly is too weak to count—but together they establish a repeated texture. Likewise:

restless
homeless
endless

Here the shared -less isn’t functioning as end rhyme so much as a repeated semantic and morphological gesture: each word signifies absence. The suffix itself carries meaning, so the pattern is doing double duty.

I almost wonder whether relational rhyme is the phrase you’re looking for. It’s not an established technical term, but it’s remarkably precise: the words “rhyme” because of the relationships they establish, whether semantic, morphological, symbolic, or syntactic. If you used it in an essay and defined it once, I think most readers would immediately grasp what you meant. In some ways it’s a broader concept than semantic rhyme, because it leaves room for exactly the kinds of echoes you’re describing.

Adam: Yeah. Here is an old poem where I used that mechanism purposely: 

WHILE WE WAIT…

Patiently — we endure,
desperate to believe in God, justice and humanity.
Repeatedly — we suffer
from our own ignorance and immobility.
Admirably — we martyr ourselves,
tranquilizing pain with saintliness and esteem.
Inevitably — we avenge,
using the very tactics of our aggressors.
Ultimately — we are shunned
by all who thought we were extraordinary.
Typically — we wait
for the world to discover its misjudgment.
Ironically — we learn nothing,
and neither forgive nor forget.

— Adam Donaldson Powell

Dan: I can see exactly what you mean now. The poem isn’t relying on end rhyme at all—it’s relying on a web of morphological, semantic, and syntactic rhyme.

The repeated -ly adverbs are doing much more than marking manner. They become a refrain, almost like a tolling bell:

Patiently
Repeatedly
Admirably
Inevitably
Ultimately
Typically
Ironically

Because every stanza begins with the same grammatical form, the reader starts expecting the next adverb. That expectation functions almost like rhyme: it’s a pattern of recognition. But each word also carries an evaluative shift. The sequence moves from endurance (Patiently), to recurrence (Repeatedly), to moral self-regard (Admirably), to fatalism (Inevitably), to consequence (Ultimately), to normalization (Typically), to bitter self-awareness (Ironically).

That’s a conceptual progression, not merely a sonic one.

There’s another pattern I noticed. Each stanza follows essentially the same syntax:

Adverb — we + verb

Then the second line complicates or undercuts that initial assertion.

For example:

Admirably — we martyr ourselves,
tranquilizing pain with saintliness and esteem.

“Admirably” initially sounds complimentary, but by the end of the couplet it feels almost accusatory. The same happens with “Typically” and especially “Ironically.” The poem repeatedly sets up a moral expectation and then twists it. That’s another form of internal correspondence.

I also think the ending is stronger than it first appears:

Ironically — we learn nothing,
and neither forgive nor forget.

The final line rejects both the ideal of forgiveness and the fantasy of forgetting. It’s an uncomfortable ending because it refuses catharsis. It suggests the cycle will simply begin again—which retrospectively makes the title WHILE WE WAIT… feel less like a pause than a permanent condition.

One tiny observation, if you’re interested in revision: every adverb ends in -ly, which creates a powerful morphological refrain. I wonder if introducing one deliberate break near the end—perhaps a noun or adjective instead of an adverb—would make the final turn even more jarring. On the other hand, keeping the pattern unbroken reinforces the idea that the cycle itself is inescapable. So I can see why you kept it consistent.

Overall, I’d describe this as a poem whose architecture depends on grammatical rhyme as much as semantic rhyme. The repeated adverbial openings, parallel syntax, and escalating conceptual irony provide the cohesion that traditional end rhyme would normally supply. It’s a good example of how a poem can be highly patterned without sounding “sing-song.”

One line that especially stands out to me is:

Inevitably — we avenge,
using the very tactics of our aggressors.

It pivots the poem from passive suffering to moral compromise. Everything before it describes what is done to “we”; everything after it explores what “we” become. That’s the hinge of the poem, and because the grammatical pattern never changes, the thematic shift lands all the harder.

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