Rhymes are not a mere mental fabrication. They appear, in a similar way, as the actions and reflections of everyday life.

Rhymes are echoes -- an agreement to play back the original sound, with the delightful distortion that occurs in the voice of the second rhyme. It is the variation that makes the sound pleasing and interesting; words are rarely set to rhyme with themselves.

In music, the harmony is a type of rhyme -- playing off the original note while adding its own character, simultaneously with the original, without the delay that poetry imposes. Harmony achieves its beauty in a balance of consonance and dissonance; the poet's word may display perfect consonance, if it rhymes with itself -- or extreme dissonance, if it is followed by no rhyme.