The Prosody Workshop · the rhyme lab
The Rhyme the Eye Can't Hear
A rhyme is a fact about sound. English spelling stopped recording the sound centuries ago, so the eye is fooled where the ear is not: love/move look like a rhyme and aren't; Dickinson's Room/Storm don't look like one and are. This lab reads the sound, from the dictionary's own phones, and names the kind. It shows its working, and it says out loud where the dictionary ends and the guess begins.
1 The anvil: strike any two words together
Type two rhyme-words. The engine finds each word's rime (from its last stressed vowel to the end), lays the two side by side, and tells you what kind of rhyme they make, and why.
2 The scheme reader: what the form promises, what the sound delivers
A fixed form declares its rhyme scheme: a sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG by definition. The lab's job is not to guess the scheme, it is to measure how each declared rhyme actually lands in the mouth today. Green is a perfect rhyme; blue and amber are slant; pink is an eye rhyme the language broke.
3 A whole poem built on the slant: Owen's pararhyme
4 The rhyme is a clock: eye rhymes that were once perfect
Some eye rhymes are not spelling's fault at all: they were real rhymes when written, and the sound moved out from under them. Read as a dictionary reads, they look broken; read as a date-stamp, they tell you exactly which vowel shifted, and when.