Aneye rhyme, also called avisual rhyme or asight rhyme, is arhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently.[1]
Many olderEnglish poems, particularly those written inEarly Modern andMiddle English, contain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by modern readers, they are now eye rhymes because ofshifts in pronunciation, especially theGreat Vowel Shift. These are called historic rhymes. Historic rhymes are used by linguists to reconstruct pronunciations of old languages, and are used particularly extensively in thereconstruction of Old Chinese, whose writing system does not allude directly to pronunciation.
One example of a historic rhyme (i.e., one that was a true rhyme but is now an eye rhyme) is the following:
The great man down, you mark his favouriteflies;
The poor advanced makes friends ofenemies.
— Player King, in William Shakespeare,Hamlet, act III, scene II
WhenHamlet was writtenc. 1600, "flies" and "enemies" rhymed in local dialects, but as a result of the shifts in pronunciation since then, the original rhyme has been lost.
Another example of a historic rhyme is the following:
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realmsobey;
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimestea.
— Alexander Pope,The Rape of the Lock, canto III
When the poem was published in 1712, the word "tea" (which is only attested in English from about 60 years before) was often pronounced "tay", as it still is in certain dialects; the pronunciation "tee" predominated from the mid-18th century.[2]
Historic rhymes that were lost phonetically in the Great Vowel Shift were sometimes retained as conventional rhymes. For example, in 1940,W. H. Auden wrote:
Let the Irish vessellie,
Emptied of itspoetry.
— "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
This represents the same historic rhyme as "flies" and "enemies" above, even though by the 20th century "lie" and "poetry" had long since ceased to rhyme. (When Auden himself read the poem aloud, he pronounced "lie" and "poetry" in the usual, non-rhyming 20th-century fashion.[3])
Similarly, although the noun "wind" shifted to its modern pronunciation during the 1700s, it remained a convention to rhyme it as though it were pronounced "wined", so that in 1896,Ernest Dowson wrote:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with thewind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out ofmind...
— "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae"
