[JonathonW]

Don't worry; English pronunciation can be mastered simply through tough, thorough thought.

(English "o" is tons of fun-- of the 22 vowel sounds listed on the English orthography page on Wikipedia, only two can't generally have the letter "o" involved.)

[cmehdy]

The Chaos (1922) - http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.

[teddyh]

Complete version as originally published in 1920: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos>

[looping8]

I have seen similar joke poems but this one was too much for me. I even saw words I never heard of before, like "sward". For anyone like me - it's a lawn or a meadow.

[thfuran]

>Made has not the sound of bade

Doesn't it though?

[pja]

I think you might argue that the a in bade is stressed whereas the a in made is unstressed?

Otherwise I agree, there’s no difference between the two in my dialect.

Wiktionary suggests that it can be a homophone with bad in some dialects though, so perhaps that’s what the author was thinking of?

[filterfish]

That's fantastic!

[gniv]

> through tough, thorough thought.

Neat example. What's also interesting is that it's hard to parse visually too, so it slows down reading.

[namtab00]

it's also missing a final ", though"

[EliRivers]

Indeed.

I apologise that none of the following words rhyme; rough, cough, plough, dough, lough, hiccough.