What’s An Illusion Rhyme?

End rhymes, Internal rhymes, Slant rhymes are all fairly well known in music and poetry, but what about “Illusion rhymes?” An Illusion rhyme is usually a group of multisyllabic words that when spoken sound like perfect rhymes, but when broken down they only loosely, if at all, rhyme. Here is an example from the song “Premonition (Intro),” by Eminem:

If I was as half as good as I was
I’m still twice as good as you’ll ever be
Only way that you’re ahead of me’s alphabetically
’Cause if you diss me I’m coming after you(u) like the letter V

ev • er • be

head • of • me

bet • ic • lly

let • ter • V

Breaking out the Illusion rhymes above you can see that the first syllables are slant rhymes (ev, head, bet, and let), and the third syllables are perfect rhymes (be, me, lly, V). However, the middle syllables don’t rhyme at all; yet when saying the words fluidly out loud, it sounds like the whole phrase rhymes.

There’s not a lot of information about Illusion rhymes because they’re very similar to Compound rhymes, but it’s just… an illusion.