The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Love/prove is another commonly found eye-rhyme pair, as in Marlowe’s вЂPassionate Shepherd to his Love’.Come live with me and be my loveAnd we will all the pleasures prove. It is generally held that these may well have been true sound rhymes in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s day. They have certainly been used as eye-rhymes since, however. Larkin used the same pair nearly four hundred years later in вЂAn Arundel Tomb’:…and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love. In his poem вЂMeiosis’ Auden employs another conventional eye-rhyme for that pesky word:The hopeful falsehood cannot stem with loveThe flood on which all move and wish to move. The same poet’s вЂPrecious Five’ shows that eye-rhyme can be used in all kinds of ways:Whose oddness may provokeTo a mind-saving jokeA mind that would it wereAn apathetic sphere: Another imperfect kind is WRENCHED rhyme, which to compound the felony will usually go with a wrenched accent.He doesn’t mind the language being bentIn choosing words to force a wrenched accГ©nt.He has no sense of how the verse should singAnd tries to get away with wrenched rhyming.A bad wrenched rhyme won’t ever please the eye:Or find its place in proper poetry ...»