> The poem from which those familiar phrases come, William Blake’s “The Tyger”, has a lovely cockney rhyme at the end of its first verse: A lot has been writte

> The poem from which those familiar phrases come, William Blake’s “The Tyger”, has a lovely cockney rhyme at the end of its first verse: A lot has been written about the rhyme of “What immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry?”. Long story short, these words were probably pronounced with the same final diphthong [əi] in Blake’s time, or they had been pronounced that way recently enough (the past century or so) that it was still accepted as a rhyme. Poetry often relies on somewhat old-fashioned language to fit the meter and sense of a piece.