Did "Old Mother Hubbard" ever rhyme?

Question

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there, the cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.

It's always bothered me that "bone" doesn't rhyme with "none", especially since the other verses in the poem seem to try harder to rhyme the 2nd and 4th lines.

The third verse is worse:

She went to the undertaker's
To buy him a coffin;
When she came back
The dog was laughing.

Is this a case of a shift in pronunciation? Or does it simply not rhyme? (Or, does it rhyme, but only in certain accents?)

Answer 1

I admire your will to contrive history to turn Old Mother Hubbard into a master work of literature. Unfortunately in this case, I don't think there's terribly much evidence for these words rhyming (or at least, not for a majority of speakers). If you look at dictionaries from the 19th century, the words "bone" and "none" are squarely transcribed with different vowels, as are "coffin" and "laughing". (There's a chance that, once upon a time, more speakers did pronounce the vowel of "laugh", and indeed other words such as "dance", similar to that of "coffin", but sadly not at the time Old Mother Hubbard was written.)

If you want to be euphemistically kind to Old Mother Hubbard, then you could call it a "visual rhyme". An alternative theory is that Old Mother Hubbard is actually not a master work of literature. Shock horror.

Answer 2

This is a kind of rhyming known as off rhyme:

off rhyme n. A partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance or consonance only, as in dry and died or grown and moon. Also called half rhyme, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, slant rhyme.

So the answer is no, those lines don't rhyme perfectly. But they sorta kinda do rhyme, if you're not too strict.

Answer 3

coffin and laughing (laffin') rhyme in Lancashire dialect Same as forehead (forred) and horrid.

But I've never heard none and bone rhyme.