WMR said that he wrote these poems as bouts
rimés in 1849 with John Everett Millais.
Along with Patmore's “
The first three of these were written to bouts-rimes. As to No. 1, ‘” (“Noon Rest ’, I have a tolerably clear recollection that the rhymes were prescribed to me by Millais, on one of the days in 1849 when I was sitting to him for the head of Lorenzo in his first Preraphaelite picture from Keats's ‘Isabella ’. No. 4, ‘Sheer Waste ’ was not abouts rimésperformance. It was chiefly the outcome of an early afternoon spent lazily in Regent's Park
Introduction” to the 1901 facsimile reprint of
The whole sequence comprises nine poems. They were published, however, in two parts: four in
These poems are usefully compared with the series of
bouts rimés sonnets that DGR composed in 1848
to rhymes set by WMR. The difference is striking. In terms of a
traditional distinction made for Pre-Raphaelite work, WMR's poems are
distinctly Ruskinian whereas DGR's already display a strong element of
the Paterian. DGR's sonnets are gathered together by WMR in his
First printed in