temperate symmetry

[ripley]

Hello everybody,

I have an anthology with several poems and an audio CD. Today I listened to Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? and a doubt has aroused in my mind. The speaker reads the word temperate as one would find it in the dictionary, but in this sonnet I think it should be read in a different way so as to rhyme with the last word of the previous line. What do you think about it?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

I would pronouce temperate in this way: tempereit; besides with a stress on the last syllable "eit" because of the pattern of the jambic pentameter.

Also in Blake's poem "the tyger" the speaker pronounces the word
simmetry" as the dictionary indicates, though, in this way the scheme of the rhyme is not respected:

Tiger! tiger! burning bright
in the forests of the night
what immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful simmetry (I would read it "simetrai" instead of simetri)

Please correct any mistake I do!!!!

Bye Ripley

 

[Tdol]

In the first, the rhyme schem is not AA:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

With the Blake, it's a close rhyme- it would sound a bit artifical to me to force the sound.;-)

 

[ripley]

Hi Tdol,
Ok that's not an AA rhyme, but my problem remains; since if you pronounce temperate with the schwa sound the line doesn't rhyme with anything, so breaking the rhyme pattern. How would you read the term?
As for Blake's poem, how would you decide to pronounce the word simmetry? I mean,couldn't the y simply be a case of poetic licence?
I heard a song of Eminem's in which he pronounces the word "imitating" "aimaiteitin". I think he does it because it actually sound better so. Couldn'i the same case with "Shake" and "Blake"? :lol:
Ripley

 

[Tdol]

Maybe they pronounced it that way in those days. Pope rhymes 'tea' with 'obey', which doesn't work nowadays. ;-)