How do you pronounce the word 'symmetry' in this poem?
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I'm not a native speaker and I though the '-y' in symmetry rhymed with "tree", not "try"?
"symmetry" does rhyme with tree, but word pronunciations change over the years. It could also just be a half rhyme.
say whatever you fucking want, spineless fat idiot
im not fat dont say things like that about me please
Obligatory.
You are mom is imperfect. It's clearly meant to be read like try in this instance.
It's up to the reader of the poem. It suggests 'try' but 'tree' is fine too.
correct way to make it rhyme is actually by pronouncing eye as "ah-YEE"
>youtube.com
Just how Veeky Forums was McClane???
Simmetry and Eye do rhyme.
Blake, as Milton and Shakespeare did, spoke words ending in "-y" not with a /i/ (a shorter "i" of words as "leave"), but with /əJ/, a higher version of the /eJ/ diphthong (a weirder version of the diphthong of the word "stake").
We have the same issue today (but not in Shakespeare's time) in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, where almost all the verses rhyme. Oberon, in act 3 scene 2 says:
Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid's archery,
Sink in apple of his eye.
When his love he doth espy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
When thou wakest, if she be by,
Beg of her for remedy.
Or in sonnet 1:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
All the words rhyme there because all of them end in /əJ/. With time each would diverge into /i/ ("archery") or /aJ/ ("by").
By the way, the words "bright" and "night" are also pronounced with the /əJ/ diphthong. During Shakespeare, Milton and Blake's time they were undergoing the Great Vowel Shift, which made many rhymes lost for us today. If you want more info, read David Crystal's "The Oxford Dictionary of Shakesperean pronunciation", and watch these videos:
youtube.com
youtu.be
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyc3q9vwhfQ
youtube.com
THUS, whenever you hear that Shakespeare spoke General American, they're wrong, since Early Modern English pronunciation was like both and neither. (Though EME was rhotic (they pronounced the "r" when written.))
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Protip: older English works sometimes (but not always) pronounced the ending "y" as "eye".
So it's "sim-eh-try", the last syllable pronounced like the verb "try", and not the modern/American "sim-uh-tree".
a cartoonish brummie accent might get it to rhyme
That's actually quite fascinating. Thanks for the links user
I tried my best to transcribe and read the first stanza. Here you go.
It's like rhyming comb with tomb. It's called an 'eye rhyme'.
No, m8. Read this:
Yeah, I should've read the thread before posting.
>great vowel shift
>late 18th century
>blake spoke like shakespeare
I'm not actually implying that. I'm saying that the "-y" thing works for The Tyger. We have to bear in mind that the Great Vowel Shift happened throughout a long period of time (between the 12th and the 18th century) Thus, by the time The Tyger was written, the "-y" diphthongized was still a feature of English. [spoler] and I'm doing the kind of guesswork that lead linguists to infer all this [/spoiler]
Holy guacamole, thanks user. That's really interesting
Unironically a good short poem.
Good post
It rhymes with "tree", you're not saying it wrong it's just that english poetry sucks for the most part.
this kid is going places.
Is this Rupi Kaur?