ABSTRACT
This exercise in bouts-rimés contrived by Mary and S. is written loosely in ink on p. 185 of Nbk 11. Bouts-rimés was a fashionable amusement, originating in literary circles in seventeenth-century France, which required one person to complete a poem to a series of end-rhymes supplied by another. The object was to achieve as flowing and natural a composition as possible starting from the often arbitrary and even incongruous series of rhymes that had been set for the exercise. Byron's Duchess of Fitz-Fulke in Don Juan (xvi 50) is an adept: ‘But of all verse, what most insured her praise/Were sonnets to herself or bouts-rimés’. In this case the five pairs of rhymes were first written by Mary; as they are in the same ink as the rest of the lines, it is likely that, in the spirit of the game, she then handed the pen to S. and he filled in the verses immediately. Medwin recalled S.’s composing a poem from rhymes on a single word in a stricter variation of bouts-rimés:
On one occasion, I remember a remarkable instance of Shelley's facility and exercise of imagination. A word was chosen, and all the rhymes to it in the language, and they were very numerous, set down, without regard to their corresponding meanings, and in a few minutes he filled in the blanks with a beautifully fanciful poem, which, probably, no one preserved, though now I should highly prize such a relic
(Medwin (1913)).