"I say...Lusitani-ay"

[Jonathan Lighter]

That could be the explanation, but in Arnold's case it comes in the very final word of the poem. This creates, to my ear and sensibility, an extremely bathetic fall that I'd have thought Arnold would have eschewed.

  What I'm getting at, with the help of Gabby Hayes, is the possibility that "Californiay," "Lusitaniay," and "Asiay" (or something closer to monophtongal / e /) may once have been standard pronunciations.( / E / in both "say" and "Lusitania" seems like a plausible alternative.)

  My own phonology calls for / s Ei / and Lusitani / ^ /.  Pretty bathetic in combination.

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: "I say...Lusitani-ay"
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Or is it poetic license? There may have existed certain sorts of "rhyme" that were (by tradition) deemed poetically acceptable whether or not they correlated much with anybody's pronunciation.

John Donne (c1600), in his "Valediction: Of Weeping," used a similar rhyme: "On a round ball / A workeman that hath copies by, can lay / An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, / And quickly make that, which was nothing, all."

--Charlie
____________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 06:41:59 -0700
>From: Jonathan Lighter
>Subject: "I say...Lusitani-ay"
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>In 1879 Matthew Arnold wrote a sonnet titled "S. S. Lusitania" concerning an offspring's voyage on the ship of that name (not the one torpedoed in 1915).
>
> At the conclusion of this very serious sonnet, Arnold rhymes "Lusitania" with "I say."

> This is obviously not "eye-rhyme" and seems unlikely to me to be "slant rhyme." It reminds me instead of how character actors like Gabby Hayes used to pronounce "California" in old westerns.
>
> Does anyone know enough about standard mid-Victorian pronunciation and/or poetic practice to elucidate this "rhyme" ? Did Arnold have some in-between diphthong in both words ?
>
> JL

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