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In my choir we are currently practicing some carols, including See amid the the winter's snow, which was written by Edward Caswall (1814–1878). Its six verses and refrain each have two pairs of very clear rhymes, except for the second verse:

Lo, within a manger lies
He who built the starry skies;
He who, throned in height sublime,
Sits amid the cherubim

The words "sublime" and "cherubim" don't rhyme (IPA: /səˈblaɪm/ vs. /ˈtʃɛrəbɪm/). However, it seems possible that there was a different pronunciation due to regional accents, changes in the language over time, etc.

Was "sublime" pronounced "sub-LIM" or was "cherubim" pronounced "cheru-BAIM"?

I find it hard to believe that Caswall wrote two lines that aren't supposed to rhyme when the other 26 obviously are rhyming.

Laurel
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Jonatan
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    The rhyme is close enough for a poet. – Hot Licks Nov 29 '16 at 21:29
  • Goss probably took a poetic licence here. –  Nov 29 '16 at 21:30
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's questioning poetic license. – Hot Licks Nov 29 '16 at 21:30
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    Many times in poetry a writer will use a near rhyme (a near miss, if you will) and select a word spelled similarly but doesn't actually rhyme. – Alan Carmack Nov 29 '16 at 21:37
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    Is this really off-topic? The question is wether the words can or cannot be pronounced in a certain way, not wether the author has the right or not to take liberties. There are plenty of cases were words have variations in pronunciation explained by regional accents, changes in the language over time etc. – Jonatan Nov 29 '16 at 21:55
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    This question is about pronounciation, not about poetry. @Jonatan I suggest you listen to the performances found on YouTube. – michael.hor257k Nov 29 '16 at 21:59
  • The recordings I've found indicates that no one tries to make the lines rhyme. My OCD is hurting. ;-) – Jonatan Nov 29 '16 at 22:02
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    @Jonatan - could Goss have originally meant to use the French term "sublime" which actually rhymes with cherubim. –  Nov 29 '16 at 22:16
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    Someone can pronounce poetry any way they want. William Blake's The Tyger is a case in point -- some people pronounce the words more or less "normally" while others try to contort them to rhyme. And both groups insist that their way is the way Blake would prefer. – Hot Licks Nov 29 '16 at 22:17
  • Similar: Was the pronunciation of “symmetry” different in the past? – choster Nov 29 '16 at 22:20
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    No, the two words do not rhyme. But they have the same vowel (i) and consonant (m). This is one type of a half rhyme or slant rhyme. There is plenty of information about this on the internet. For example, on Literary Devices – Alan Carmack Nov 29 '16 at 22:54
  • I think it's a perfectly reasonable consonance rhyme and that it would go unnoticed if the song was based on assonance and consonance rhyming. – Jonatan Nov 29 '16 at 23:24
  • Reminds me of Lana Del Rey's song "Radio". The lyrics go: "Lick me up and take me like a vitamin / 'Cause my body's sweet like sugar venom, oh yeah" -- where "vitamin" was pronounced as "vit-uh-min". Lots of songwriters and poets do this. As Alan stated, it's called a half/slant rhyme. – Aleksandr Hovhannisyan Nov 29 '16 at 23:58
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    To all the close-voters, this is not off-topic. The poem is motivation for wondering about pronunciation. Maybe there are some dialects in which these two rhyme, very reasonable question. – Mitch Nov 30 '16 at 13:58
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    Watched a TV program about Shakespeare just recently, where they showed that many sonnets that don't rhyme very well did rhyme when they were written. – gnasher729 Dec 13 '16 at 09:29

3 Answers3

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If you use the French pronunciation of sublime: /syblim/, and the Hebrew pronunciation of the -im ending: /-im/, they both rhyme with seem.

I very much doubt that's the way Edward Caswell intended you to pronounce the hymn.

Walker's pronouncing dictionary from 1828 says that sublime and cherubim were pronounced the same way then as they are today.

Peter Shor
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Most likely, this is just an eye rhyme:

Agreement in spelling, but not in sound, of the ends of words or of lines of verse, as in have, grave.

(Dictionary.com)

BladorthinTheGrey
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Sublime and cherubim have different vowel length. One is /ai/ the other is /il

Anty Neina
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