Shakespeare's Sonnets Summary and Analysis

A Note on the Pronunciation of Early Modern English

Modern readers of Shakespeare's sonnets may be unjustifiably disturbed by oddities in the poet's rhymes. In sonnet 10, for example, the poet rhymes the word love with prove, and in sonnet 145 he rhymes come with doom. This may seem like laziness to us, but in fact in Shakespeare's time all these words had the same vowel quality, love sounding more like "loove" and come like "coom" (cf. Old English lufian and cuman, respectively).