OK, we should all know the public domain poem The Tyger:
In it, Blake used a rather marked rhyme that today, in my dialect, fails to work entirely. Specifically, ‘eye’ and ‘symmetry’ don’t rhyme even a little bit. Did they rhyme for Blake? I know the form demands it, but unless a foot can kick your ass you aren’t taking orders from it. If they did rhyme, did Blake pronounce it ‘eee’ or ‘simm-ih-try’?
This flammable feline has been bothering me for too long now. Hell, it doesn’t even rhyme in the Bri’ish dialects I know of.
I’m also convinced that back in the day poets gave themselves a fair amount of leeway to “rhyme” things that were not pronounced, even then, similarly, if the letters matched up. I call this the “lame rhyme.” Check out E. Dickinson for many an example.
You’ll also notice that the symmetry line also only contains three accented feet, whereas all the other lines contain four. (Unless, you force an accent on the ultimate syllable of “symmetry.” I suppose you could also make a case for the first foot being a spondee, depending on your reading, but, in any case, the fourth and final lines of the poem stick out rhythmically from the rest.)
I’ve never heard eye/symmetry as a perfect rhyme. My simple interpretation is that Blake was changing up the rhyme and rhythm in order to emphasize these lines. You could probably also make some sort of case for it also echoing the idea of symmetry (or perhaps imperfect human symmetry, depending on how you want to look at it.)
Personally, I think it’s mostly a musical effect to underscore and engrain those lines. When everything else is surrounded in perfect, sing-songy, masculine rhymes, and a line juts out like that, you’re going to remember it even more.
That was on purpose? I always thought that it was part of that seeming obstinance of upper class Engish that all words, no matter the language, should be pronounced as God and the King/Queen intended and that Spanish, Italian, and French were lesser, Catholic tongues to be mangled at will.
That Wikipedia article makes the claim, but doesn’t seem to offer evidence for the claim, that it was done on purpose as a joke. Do you know of any other cites?
I’m confused. Why do you think the claim isn’t true? Byron’s Don Juan is a parody of the Don Juan legend. Nearly everything in the poem is some sort of joke. Even the shipwreck scene with the cannibalism is played for laughs…
Blake was a big fan of slant rhyme. I wonder if that was related to his engravings. Poetry seemed to be a very visual experience for him. I’d lay odds that when composing a poem, he was far more concerned with how it would look in a print than with how it would sound.
I’d say he’s at least equally concerned with both. There’s no lack of technique in Blake’s poetry, and he has a very sharp ear for the sound of words. As much of an innovator as he was in printmaking (inventing relief etching, the inverse of intaglio etching), it’d be a bit of a dismissal of his skills as a poet to say he was more interested with how the poems looked rather than sounded.
Color me surprised that nobody has mentioned the concept of “poetic license” yet. Wiki article that’s rather rambling but not uninformative.
Me, I first encountered the concept in Ninth Grade Honors English class. We were using Louis Untermeyer’s collection of story poems as a textbook, and the first time we came to a rhyme that didn’t…exactly…rhyme, and our little 14-year-old heads started to explode, the teacher simply explained, “It’s called poetic license when it doesn’t quite rhyme, but the word the poet wants to use is the perfect word, so he goes ahead and lets it not…exactly…rhyme. And that’s Ohhhh-kay.” And we all collectively filed the factoid away and moved on.
Sure, you can lop everything under “poetic license,” but I think that’s a rather oversimplistic explanation meant for 9th graders.
I guess I take issue to this: “It’s called poetic license when it doesn’t quite rhyme, but the word the poet wants to use is the perfect word, so he goes ahead and lets it not…exactly…rhyme.”
Poets very often are quite conscious of not making a word rhyme exactly. It’s not necessarily that the word is perfect so rhyme be damned. It’s quite often not wanting to use a masculine rhyme because the effect is unwanted. (To my ears, perfect rhyme in AABB form these days can sound a bit sing-songy and “light.” For most subjects, I prefer more gentle “rhymes.” See Seamus Heaney for somebody who uses traditional forms and more contemporary ideas of rhyme in his work.)
I think Blake is being very deliberate in his choice of metrical variance and non-rhyme, and it’s for emphatic effect.
