Dearest creature in creation, |
Study English pronunciation. |
I will teach you in my verse |
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. |
I will keep you, Suzy, busy, |
Make your head with heat grow dizzy. |
Tear in eye, your dress will tear. |
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. |
Just compare heart, beard, and heard, |
Dies and diet, lord and word, |
Sword and sward, retain and Britain. |
(Mind the latter, how it's written.) |
Now I surely will not plague you |
With such words as plaque and ague. |
But be careful how you speak: |
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; |
Cloven, oven, how and low, |
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. |
Hear me say, devoid of trickery, |
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, |
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, |
Exiles, similes, and reviles; |
Scholar, vicar, and cigar, |
Solar, mica, war and far; |
One, anemone, Balmoral, |
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; |
Gertrude, German, wind and mind, |
Scene, Melpomene, mankind. |
Billet does not rhyme with ballet, |
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. |
Blood and flood are not like food, |
Nor is mould like should and would. |
Viscous, viscount, load and broad, |
Toward, to forward, to reward. |
And your pronunciation's OK |
When you correctly say croquet, |
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, |
Friend and fiend, alive and live. |
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour |
And enamour rhyme with hammer. |
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, |
Doll and roll and some and home. |
Stranger does not rhyme with anger, |
Neither does devour with clangour. |
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, |
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, |
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, |
And then singer, ginger, linger, |
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, |
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. |
Query does not rhyme with very, |
Nor does fury sound like bury. |
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. |
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. |
Though the differences seem little, |
We say actual but victual. |
Refer does not rhyme with deafer. |
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. |
Mint, pint, senate and sedate; |
Dull, bull, and George ate late. |
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, |
Science, conscience, scientific. |
Liberty, library, heave and heaven, |
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. |
We say hallowed, but allowed, |
People, leopard, towed, but vowed. |
Mark the differences, moreover, |
Between mover, cover, clover; |
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, |
Chalice, but police and lice; |
Camel, constable, unstable, |
Principle, disciple, label. |
Petal, panel, and canal, |
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. |
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, |
Senator, spectator, mayor. |
Tour, but our and succour, four. |
Gas, alas, and Arkansas. |
Sea, idea, Korea, area, |
Psalm, Maria, but malaria. |
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. |
Doctrine, turpentine, marine. |
Compare alien with Italian, |
Dandelion and battalion. |
Sally with ally, yea, ye, |
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. |
Say aver, but ever, fever, |
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. |
Heron, granary, canary. |
Crevice and device and aerie. |
Face, but preface, not efface. |
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. |
Large, but target, gin, give, verging, |
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. |
Ear, but earn and wear and tear |
Do not rhyme with here but ere. |
Seven is right, but so is even, |
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, |
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, |
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. |
Pronunciation -- think of Psyche! |
Is a paling stout and spikey? |
Won't it make you lose your wits, |
Writing groats and saying grits? |
It's a dark abyss or tunnel: |
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, |
Islington and Isle of Wight, |
Housewife, verdict and indict. |