“A love-machine / With clockwork joints”
Swinburne’s Rhyme Games and “Faustine”
Adam Mazel
As a young adult, Algernon Charles Swinburne participated in a culture of readers and writers who
played the literary parlor game of bouts rimés (“rhymed ends”), rhyming contests that challenged
participants to produce a poem from a predetermined set of rhymes.i This rhyme game inverts the writing
process as we usually imagine it: if we assume that when writing a poem, poets start with an idea and then
find the words to express it, then when writing bouts rimés, poets start instead with (rhyme) words and then
find or fill in the idea. Poets would work backwards from (rhyme) ends; the (rhyme) ends became the means.
In short, in bouts rimés, form takes precedence over content in the process of writing.
These youthful rhyme games were the roots of Swinburne’s mature poetry. He wrote his bouts rimés
in anapests, for example, thus practicing the long, swinging lines that would eventually become associated
with him. Thus, it should not surprise that in 1863-64, when Swinburne was playing bouts rimés with his
cousin, Mary Gordon, he was also drafting his celebrated poem Atalanta in Calydon. “I think none of those
who have since read and delighted in Atalanta would believe the amount of ‘nonsense’ which was going on
side by side with the famous work,” Gordon recounts. “We were both devoted to the game of bouts rimés,
and used to set each other pages and pages of bouts, always of a comic nature; and then he used to read them
aloud when completed, in the evening” (21)ii. As Gordon suggests, the coincident anapests of Atalanta’s lyric
songs and Swinburne’s bouts rimés start to reveal the unexpected tenuousness of the generic divide between
tragic drama and comic verse, allowing the serious and the playful, sense and “nonsense,” to both inform and
inflect each other.
Playing bouts rimés helped Swinburne practice more than just his characteristic anapests; they may
have helped him to re-imagine his writing process. Brander Matthews felt that Swinburne “[a]pparently
constructed [his ‘Sestina’] according to M. Dulot’s [the inventor of bouts rimés] theory” (621). Indeed, many
mid- to late-nineteenth century English and French poets, such as Mallarme, employed bouts rimés as a
method of poetic productioniii. Serious rhymed verse in the nineteenth century often emerged from and
circulated in a ludic context of word games that, as Matthews testifies, contemporary audiences recognized.
The foundation of nineteenth-century rhymed verse was a word game.
Bouts rimés may have influenced more than Swinburne’s writing process; they may also have
influenced how he understood poetry. For if rhyme is the essence of bouts rimé, then Swinburne’s youthful
games of bouts rimés may have contributed to his theorizing of rhyme as the essence of poetry. “Rhyme is
the native condition of lyric verse in English,” Swinburne wrote of Matthew Arnold’s poetry in 1867, only a
few years after playing bouts rimé with Gordon, “a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing, and halts and
stammers in the delivery of its message” (Hyder 80).iv Rhyme, for Swinburne, is therefore not senseless
ornamentation as it is usually thought of, but rather a clarifying medium for sense: it is a technology for
articulation. Swinburne suggests that the sonic play of rhyme does not interfere with sense but facilitates its
expression: rhyme makes sense possible. Swinburne’s understanding of sense making emerged in part from a
nonsensical rhyme game.
In 1862 around the time he played bouts rimés with his cousin Gordon, Swinburne wrote his
promiscuously rhymed dramatic monologue, “Faustine.”v But rather than begin composition with a
predetermined set of rhymes as in bouts rimés, Swinburne’s former friend the painter James Whistler points
out that Swinburne instead attempted “to see how many rhymes he could find to the name [Faustine]” (The
Whistler Journal)vi. In other words, the goal of his rhyme game was not to write a poem from a limited set of
rhymes as in bouts rimés, but ideally to produce an unlimited set of rhymes, to keep the rhymes going, to
keep the game going, “to see how many rhymes he could find to the name.” I turn to “Faustine” because it
allows us to understand how Swinburne thought about rhyme. In my conference paper, I want to invite you
to think through with me how, in the proliferating rhymes of “Faustine,” Swinburne is theorizing rhyme play
in a context of Victorian rhyme games.
“Faustine” emerged from a popular Victorian rhyme game: “We were also fond of what are now
called ‘Limericks,’” Gordon recounts, remembering her flirtation with Swinburne, “and he had a way of
finding the most ridiculous and expressive rhymes to names of all sorts. I recollect one evening he said of a
name casually mentioned, ‘I wonder if one could find a rhyme to Atkinson,’ and then immediately spouted:
‘A tree with all its catkins on / Was planted by Miss Atkinson!’” (21). Swinburne’s playful attempts to find a
rhyme for the proper name “Atkinson” was the same game as his playful attempts to find rhymes for the
proper name “Faustine.”vii
“Limericks” was part of a broader popular context of Victorian rhyme play, in particular the popular
rhyme game that Brander Matthews called “extravagant rhyming”: the mid- to late-century Victorian delight
in the finding of ingenious rhymes for words that seemingly have no rhyme—for example, “silver,” “month,”
and “orange” (622-23)viii. The dramatist and humorist F. C. Burnand challenged readers of the journal The
Graphic to find a disyllabic rhyme to “silver.” His friend the librettist W.S. Gilbert took up the challenge by
replying in a latter issue that he was “engaged in perfecting an ingenious apparatus for the purpose of
extracting sunbeams from the cucumber of commerce … and when it is completed I shall call it a “Chilver!”
(427)ix. Gilbert would aestheticize “extravagant rhyming” into such songs as “I am the very model of a
modern major general” from The Pirates of Penzance, just as Swinburne would aestheticize his version of
“extravagant rhyming” in pushing the limits of how many rhymes he could generate from the name Faustine.
“Faustine” began as a rhyme game and is itself a poem about games, from the gladiatorial combats to
entertain the Empress Faustine to the Faustian wager for Faustine’s soul. As a rhyme game about games,
“Faustine” is an endless regress or mise en abyme of play that establishes a dialectic between content and
form, between the games that the poem describes and the game that the poem is. Each plays off and with the
other; each is a lens through which to view the other. Thus, the poem interrogates its own raison d’être, and
therefore its own assumptions, ideological convictions, and practices, by letting gamed content crossexamine played form and vice versa.
“Faustine” traces the reappearances and transformations of the highly erotic eponymous figure
throughout historyx. As Faustine returns in different forms, as every Faustine is a different version of the
same woman, she is a figure for representation itself as well as a self-reflexive allegory for the poem’s
endless sonic echoes: from the poem’s abaB (where B is the refrain) rhyme scheme that obsessively repeats
the name Faustine across 41 stanzas, to the omnipresent alliterations, assonances, and consonances that
characterize Swinburne’s signature stylexi. Faustine’s interminable returns echo, even allegorize, “Faustine’s”
interminable rhymes. If very reference to the figure Faustine is also a reference to the poem “Faustine”
itselfxii, then “Faustine” is about rhyme itself; it reflects on the expansive redundancies of its own redounding
form.
So when Swinburne describes Faustine as a “love-machine,” a woman tacitly determined by her
autoerotic mechanisms of desire, he also describes “Faustine,” a poem tacitly determined by the autoerotic
mechanisms of its rhymes:
You seem a thing that hinges hold,
A love-machine
With clockwork joints of supple gold—
No more, Faustine. (ll. 141-44)
Scholars have long studied Swinburne’s metrical masochism, how his meters pulse out the pain and pleasure
of erotic desire, but scholars have yet to explore the longing encoded in his desiring rhymesxiii. For Swinburne
to call “Faustine” and its promiscuous rhymes a “love-machine” is for Swinburne to relate rhyme and desire;
he is asking us to think about that relation; he is offering offer an erotics as much as a poetics of rhyme. The
poem thus offers a fertile opportunity to deepen our understanding of Swinburne’s verse by exploring the
erotics of Swinburne’s rhymes in addition to that of Swinburne’s meters and the poem offers a fertile
opportunity to ask why and how desire might function in the context of rhyme (and vice versa). The poem’s
eroticized rhymes—its “hinges” or “joints” of networked, interlocking sound that adhere the poem’s lines—
speak I argue to the nineteenth-century dream of rhyme as a self-perpetuating, mechanical system (like
“clockwork”) endlessly capable of generating more and more rhymes, more and more lines, and therefore
more and more desire. In “Faustine,” play, rhyme, and desire became perpetual; rhyme’s echoes never grow
silent; the game of rhymed ends never really ends. The play of rhymed desire is as productive as it is
mechanical: a rhymed poem is a love-machine, a desire-machine. Strangely, rhyme’s mechanical stimulus of
one’s feelings, one’s body, had appeal.
2
Swinburne’s perpetual rhyme play made rhyme algorithmic; he puts the rhythm in algorithm. I define
algorithm as an (nearly) endlessly repeatable set of steps (input) that guarantee a result (output). In the case
of the poem “Faustine,” the input is the keyword “Faustine,” the guaranteed output is a network of rhymes, if
not a poem. To imagine writing rhyme algorithmically is to imagine writing rhyme as mechanical, mindless,
senseless, automatic: like Faustine, the working of an automaton. When Swinburne tried “to see how many
rhymes he could find to the name” he did not rhyme to support any underlying idea, argument, or purpose but
simply to generate innumerable sonic equivalences. Thus a decade later Robert Louis Stevenson together
with Gleeson White would argue that the playful recurrences of rhymed forms followed “mechanical laws”
(White lxi) the writing of which was a “mechanical exercise” akin to becoming an automatonxiv. Nineteenthcentury play and in particular rhyme play could be imagined as automatic, just as aesthetic form could be
imagined as mechanical, driven less by intentionality than by a set of repeatable, self-perpetuating steps
almost divested from authorial control. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the Victorians might have
imagined rhyme as active if not agential in its own production, just as the poet was re-imagined as a
“machine” ceding willfully her or his agency to the routinized programmatics of aesthetic form. So too was
desire imagined as de-subjectified: all the poetry, all the desire, all the “activity,” is in the rhyme.
If activity shifts from mechanized writer to automated rhyme, then it should not surprise us that
Faustine and her lover both cede their will to each other: as the lover of Faustine succumbs to the
dangerously erotic appeal of her “Carved lips that make my lips a cup / To drink, Faustine, / Wine and rank
poison” (ll. 15-17), so too does the lover commence the poem with a reiterated request that Faustine “Lean
back / … lean / Back” (ll. 1-3) and listen to him discourse on her history. Just as Faustine seduces to destroy,
so too does the sensuous sonic play of “Faustine” seduce our senses: its proliferating repetitions numb our
will, its network of rhymes enraptures and entraps us. “Faustine” asks us to cede our will to its rhymes in an
echo of the lover’s demand that Faustine to cede her will to the redounding sounds of his anesthetizing
eloquence. That repeated opening command (“Lean back / … lean / Back”) prepares us to let the rhymes
carry us away in a poem that gets carried away by the excessiveness of its own rhymes. We might say that the
poem explores the erotics of giving oneself over both to the intentions of a person and to the intentions of
rhyme, the pleasures of self-negation in the act of reading as we willfully cede our will to the effects of
rhyme and the “intelligent designs,” in every sense, of form. Indeed, it is hard to tell if the repetitions of
rhyme function here as elsewhere more to sedate or to seduce. Swinburne mastered rhyme so that rhyme
might master us.
Because Swinburne began the poem as a game to see how many rhymes he could produce, achieving
formal closure must have been a problem. While a limited rhymer would simply end when her or his
imagination ran dry of rhyme words, Swinburne had to find some way to restrain “Faustine” and its
proliferating rhymes. He did so by submitting the length of its form to an external constraint. As the Whistler
Journal points out, “Sandys went once with Rossetti, Swinburne and George Meredith to Hampton Court,
and between Waterloo and Hampton Court Station each one of the three wrote a poem,” Swinburne’s being
the first draft of “Faustine.” Similar to how players of bouts rimés would often time themselves to see how
fast they could produce a poem from a given set of rhymes, I infer from this suggestive quotation that the
three poets may have played a game against the clock set by the timetable of British Rail. “Faustine” is a
game within a game in which Swinburne untethered poetic closure from his own controlling designs.
“Faustine” came into being through a game and is itself about gratuitously ceding one’s will to another, about
gratuitously losing control. The growth and restraint of the poem literally emerged from play, and this play
took the form of Swinburne ceding his will to an external control.
Swinburne’s desire for perpetual rhyme and perpetual desire participated in (but cannot be reduced to)
a wider context in which the Victorians understood rhyme in terms of desire and desire in terms of rhyme.
For instance, Swinburne and his cousin, Gordon, flirted through playing bouts rimésxv. Through the playful
linking of sound, Swinburne and Gordon may have imagined the erotic linking of bodies: sonic friction
generating erotic heat. When Burnand and Gilbert publically competed with each other in discovering
extravagant rhymes, their game was not about winners and losers but about forming and perpetuating
relationships: among persons and between words. Sonic interactions mediated interpersonal interactions;
through form, the Victorians related to and flirted with each other. That the rhymed form of light verse called
3
vers de societé—or “social verse” as Swinburne called it—underwent a revival in England around 1870
should therefore not surprisexvi. For as its name implies, the writing, circulation, exchange and reading of vers
de societé was a way mid- to late-century Victorians socialized with, flirted with, and loved each other. A
poem and its rhymes were vehicles of desire that cloaked that desire.
Likewise, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Brander Matthews bookend a century that thought of
rhyme in erotic and particularly in matrimonial terms. Early in the century, the American poet Holmes called
words that had multiple rhymes (ex. cat: bat, fat, mat, etc.) “polygamous”: “I know all the polygamous
words, and all the monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones—the whole lot that have no mates—as
soon as I hear their names called.” Sonic bonds were conceived in the nineteenth century at times in tandem
with sensual bonds, erotic bonds. In a 1898 article, “An Enquiry as to Rhyme,” in Longman’s Magazine, the
American scholar Matthews used the metaphors of matrimony to describe what he felt was the dodgy use of
near rhyme: the alarming employment of near rhyme such as “river” and “ever” is for Matthews as if the poet
“did not object to the bonds of matrimony, but appreciated also the occasional advantages of free love” (450).
Some near rhymes are “tolerable” however, for “although they cannot show any wedding certificate, their
friends like to believe that they may have been morganatically married once upon a time” (450). Rhyme
offered the nineteenth century the fantasy of language in love. Words long for and become intimate with their
rhyme(s); each rhyme word reaches back and forth across the interval of a line that exists seemingly only to
prolong that desire, that lust for equivalence, pairing, pattern, and symmetry. In short, the Victorians loved
rhyme and they loved through rhyme just as rhyme itself loved, desired.
The goal of these mid- to late-century rhyme games was not about producing outcomes in the form of
winners and losers but to resist final outcomes, to perpetuate the game and to make rhyme, like desire,
perpetual. The only way one might “lose” is to end the game, to reach the limits of rhyme, the limits of
desire. Thus “Faustine” resists its own closure for the simple reason that “Faustine” intends to keep goingxvii.
“Faustine” the “love-machine” has intentions: to keep churning out rhymes, to produce continuous play and
desire without end. Playing “limericks” was more than just an opportunity show off one’s ingenuity. It also
offered the opportunity to be perpetually in rhymes, to desire without end, and to show that no word will go
dateless on a Saturday night.
The Victorian culture of rhyme play therefore differs from our contemporary poststructuralist concept
of rhyme as a-historical sonic “freeplay” through which we usually conceive of the “nonsensical” effects of
rhyme. Victorian rhyme play was less about hermetic, nonsensical sonic play and more about interactive
social play. For his contemporaries, the sound-play of Swinburne’s poetry was not “senseless” play, but rather
a kind of play that made sense within communities of readers and writers who recognized its aesthetization of
rhyme games, which is essential to their sense making. Rhyme for the Victorians was not always nonsense in
opposition to communication; what the Victorians communicated through rhyme is their desire to connect.
Victorian rhyme play like Victorian poetry was an interactive form of sociability that made sense with in
communities of Victorian readers and writers cued in to cultures of endlessly renewable rhyme games, who
understood rhyme as a game, as an occasion to invent more and more rhymes, more and more desire, and to
have those rhymes help invent more and more lines of verse.
4
i Bouts-rimé migrated from seventeenth-century France to eighteenth-century England where it “became a popular pastime”
and then in Victorian England both “a parlor game” and “a source of … vers de societe.” (Augarde 135, 37; Princeton
Encyclopedia 143).
ii In Algernon Charles Swinburne: Personal Recollections by his Cousin Mrs. Disney Leith, Gordon recounts that in “our
bouts rimé games … we frequently amused ourselves by using the anapæstic metre” (35).
iii As Clive Scott notes, “[A]ny school of poets which regards rhyme as the generative principle of verse composition will
favor a method of working essentially by bouts-rimes, as did the Parnassians, for example, guided by Banville’s axiom that
‘an imaginative gift for rhyme is, of all qualities, the one which makes the poet’” (143, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics).
iv If a rhymeless lyric, for Swinburne, has a speech impediment, then a rhymed lyric is eloquent (and rhetorical, i.e.
audience-oriented): the very opposite of Mill’s classic division between lyric and eloquence. Swinburne’s claim emerges
from a context that equated rhyme and eloquence. The Victorians imagined rhyme as a prescription for voice, a technology
of enunciation. “Rhyme is a matter of pronunciation solely,” noted Brander Matthews, “not of orthography.” Pronunciation,
and by extension the politics of social class, literacy, and identity, became interwoven in debates about rhyme. Rhymes such
as “morn” and “dawn” were imagined not as imperfect rhymes but as “cockney rhymes,” an instance of poor pronunciation
symptomatic of the author’s coarse, uneducated, lower-class status. Tom Hood’s The Rules of Rhyme (1869) argued a poet
not only “must use such rhyme only as are perfect to the ear, when correctly pronounced” (xii), but also must “examine his
rhymes carefully, and see that they chime to an educated ear. Such atrocities as ‘morn’ and ‘dawn’ stamp [the poem] with
vulgarity, as surely as the dropping of the ‘h’ stamps a speaker” (48).
v Swinburne eventually published “Faustine” in Poems and Ballads (1866).
vi Another source of the poem may be the German Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn’s novel, The Countess Faustina, which
was translated into English in 1845.
vii He did so too for contemporary poems like Atalanta in Calydon whose frequent references to “burn” pun on Swinburne
and his poem, “Félise,” “that sweetest name,” (published in his 1866 Poems and Ballads alongside “Faustine”), which
rhymes off of the eponymous proper name:
I loved you for that name of yours
Long ere we met, and long enough.
Now that one thing of all endures—
The sweetest name that ever love
Waxed weary of.
Like colours in the sea, like flowers,
Like a cat’s splendid circled eyes
That wax and wane with love for hours,
Green as green flame, blue-grey like skies,
And soft like sighs —
And all these only like your name,
And your name full of all of these.
I say it, and it sounds the same —
Save that I say it now at ease,
Your name, Félise.
In 1869, seven years after Swinburne published “Faustine,” the humorist and poet Tom Hood may have had Swinburne in
mind when critiqued poetic name games in his The Rules of Rhyme: A Guide to English Versification: “Proper names should
not be used as rhymes.” While Hood allowed the proper name of “any real individual of note—a statesman, author, or
actor” to rhyme with language “suggestive of the habits or pursuits of the owner of that name,” Hood went on to write, “But
to introduce an imaginary name for the sake of a rhyme, is work that is too cheap to be good” (58). For Hood, on the one
hand, employing a proper name to fill the need for a rhyme was “cheap,” too easy. For Swinburne, on the other hand,
finding a word to rhyme with a proper name was where the challenge of the game located itself: therein lay the contest.
viii Theorists of poetics even considered the poetic effects of the game of “extravagant rhyming” in aesthetic contexts: Tom
Hood noted how “effective” the “trick” of “affording a rhyme to a word which at first glance the reader thinks it is
impossible to rhyme” was at producing “great comical effect,” though cautioned against using it frequently.
ix If Gilbert thought he coined a nonce word, he was wrong: “Chilver,” according to the OED, in fact means “A ewe-lamb:
commonly chilver-lamb n. Also chilver-hog. (Found in Old English, and still common in southern dialects, though not
evidenced in the intervening period)” (online) and it was in use through the nineteenth century.
x A cluster of noblewomen from the Nerva–Antonine dynasty bore the name Faustina.
xi The near rhyme “Weighed … state” produces a pun: “state,” following on the heels of “Weighed,” has its sonic field
slightly torqued so that it comes to sound like “stayed, or staid” thus echoing the demand for rest or sedateness. Such sonic
echoes encumber words with an additional semantic burden.
xii The repeated references to weaving in the poem’s description of Faustine’s history stresses her textuality, its selfreflection:
For in the time we know not of
Did fate begin
Weaving the web of days that wove
Your doom, Faustine.
The threads were wet with wine, and all
Were smooth to spin;
They wove you like a Bacchanal,
The first Faustine. (ll. 93-100)
As “The first Faustine” soon becomes “A New Faustine” (l. 112), we might imagine Swinburne alluding to his own revision
process, redrafting the poem so that “You seem a thing that hinges hold … No more, Faustine” (ll. 141-4).
xiii See Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho among other studies.
xiv I. A. Richards opened his 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism—and in so doing gave birth to modern literary
criticism, with, “A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the
locomotive.” Might this understanding of a poem as a machine have helped Richards imagine a book as such?
xv C. Y. Lang writes, “[T]he evidence, both internal and external, of an unhappy affair is overwhelming.”
xvi Over the course of the eighteenth century vers de societé had declined in popularity. Frederick Locker-Lampson’s 1867
anthology of vers de societé, Lyra elegantiarum, exemplified the coming into fashion of vers de societé. Swinburne’s
roundels, like a majority of French fixed forms, were considered vers de societé. Andrew Lang mentioned in his 1891?
essay, “Théodore de Banville,” “[T]he nameless mastersingers of ancient France may be our teachers in decorative poetry,
the poetry some call vers de societé” (577). Vers de societé and French fixed forms supported the other’s revival in England
beginning around 1865-70.
xvii Closure is resisted in the considerable deferral between the two haves of the closing “if…then” conditional statement
at the end of the poem (13 lines of narrative-resisting description separate “If” from the implied “then”) and the open ended
question rather than a conclusive answer that concludes the poem.