rime riche

Rime riche was thought acceptable only in French poetry, not English, just as French fixed forms were thought suitable only for light verse, not serious poetry, because poetic form was assumed to be at odds with the poet's feeling.

While Swinburne's roundels often exemplified Gosse's "exact form in literature" and certainly were tours de force of versifying technique, this section shows that their activist rhymes also contradicted a number of contemporary prosodie prescriptions: specifically that French fixed forms were suitable only for light verse, not serious poetry, and that French rime riche was acceptable only in French verse, not English.

This French revival led Swinburne to experiment with rime riche in English.

(19) The 1877 Athenaeum summed up the perspectives of many in this late-Victorian rhyme culture: rime riche in English verse was a "barbarism." (20)

In A Century of Roundels, however, Swinburne frequently experimented with rime riche to explore the master concern of his verse: the relationship of repetition and change.

1-11) Here, Swinburne does separate the homonymie rime riche, as prosodists such as Dobson mandated.

Like the 1877 Athenaeum's claim that rime riche in English is a "barbarism," which suggests a corrupting foreignness, Dobson opens admitting that to many contemporary Victorians, French verse forms seemed a "foreign product"