I’ve always loved William Blake’s poem, The Tyger. The first 4 lines being…
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
In the late 1700’s did “eye” rhyme with “symmetry”?
The rest of the poem seems to rhyme. I’m guessing with a local dialect it did.
Possibly, though it’s also possible that Blake was using a slant rhyme.
Also known as assonance.
I’d look to see if “eye” was pronounced “eee” in other rhyming poems of Blake’s era. If so, then it probably rhymed. I think I figured out (with many other readers) that Wordsworth meant for “wind” (the noun) to be pronounced as we pronounce “wind” (the verb) by seeing how other poets rhymed it with “mind” and “lined” and “find.”
Though a good bit earlier, in “To His Coy Mistress” (thought to have been written circa 1650), Andrew Marvell wrote “And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity”, and soon “My echoing song; then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity”. The only other dodgy-seeming rhyme in the poem is “would” with “flood”.
That seems like a strong case for ‘those used to rhyme back in the day’.
But if they did rhyme in the past, which word’s pronunciation was the one that changed? Everyone in this thread seems to be assuming it was “eye”, but when I say it in my head, I always envision it as being “symmetry”. That is, the “try” at the end of the word is pronounced like “try”.
Linguist David Crystal, an expert in Elizabethan pronunciation, says that by Blake’s time, both words were pronounced as they are today. In other words, they did not rhyme. He cites John Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, published just three years before Blake’s poem, which rhymes “symmetry” with “me”. Crystal however rejects the idea that Blake was using an eye-rhyme, since all the other rhymes in the poem are exact. He suggests that Blake was deliberately evoking an archaic pronunciation of “symmetry” which did rhyme with the modern pronunciation of “eye”, consistent with Blake’s deliberately archaic spelling of “tyger”.
They would rhyme with a Yorkshire accent - which is where Marvell was born and brought up (not that we can be entirely sure his accent didn’t modify over his years at Cambridge, and later moving in aristocratic circles).