 I'm going to tell you the biggest secret there is about rhymes. In poetry, the best rhymes barely rhyme. They echo. If rhymes were images and not sounds, they'd be like mirror images, but it's a distorted mirror, a wavering reflection of a mirror, a funhouse mirror, a wobbly reverberation of sound. Now, we all know what rhyming is ever since we heard our first nursery rhyme. Ba, ba, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, one for the master, one for the dame, one for the little boy who lives down the lane. You know that wool and full rhyme and so do dame and lane. They're a little off, a little slanted, but think of dame and lane as echoes more than rhymes, and that's the secret. Rhymes are echoes. They're more like close parallels of sounds and not always the exact sounds. Like echoes, the parallel sounds change a little in the distance. They bend, they slant. The thing about English is it's not a great language for rhyming compared to other languages like Italian, where so many words N, N, A, or I, or O. In English, we even have words that are almost impossible to make rhymes for, words like orange, silver, purple, ninth, wolf, dangerous, discombobulate. And so in English poetry, where we define rhyming as the repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a line, we organize those N rhymes into patterns or schemes called rhyme schemes. You've heard of them. A rhyme scheme is made of the pattern of N rhymes in a stanza. That's it. The rhyme scheme simply identifies the pattern, nothing to it. It's more like counting than listening. We identify or code those patterns with the letters from the alphabet from the letter A onward. Take the first stanza of Emily Dickinson's poem 320. It goes, there's a certain slant of light winter afternoons that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. We identify the N rhymes as light and heft and afternoons and tunes. And we'd code it A, B, A, B. Now I know you're asking light rhymes with heft. And that stanza it does, because heft is in the rhyming spot for light. More important, the rhyme is a road sign to sense, to ambiguity, to new possible meanings. In this poem, in this stanza, light and heft share special properties with each other. The idea of heft is an echo of the idea of light. The light in line one in the poem is airy, but by line three in the poem, the light has become weighted. It has heft, the heft of cathedral tunes. And the two meanings, like the two words, echo light with heft. Check it out again and I'll leave the interpretations to you. Now, once a poet makes a rhyme pattern and sticks with it in a poem, then the cool thing is they have the opportunity to mess around with the sounds to bend the echoes, like light rhyming with heft, the sound of heft echoing light. Here's what I mean. Blue rhymes with stew, right? Now in the right spot in a stanza at the end of a line, blue can also be made to rhyme with baby. The silent E is echoed by the sound of Y. Blue can rhyme with blah, blue can rhyme with glow or stow or claw. There are so many different kinds of rhymes, non-cat in the hat rhymes that is. There are I rhymes that only rhyme when spelled out like through and rough. There are feminine rhymes that echo one or more unstressed syllables like dicing and spicing. On the other hand, there are masculine rhymes, as you might have guessed. They end in stressed syllables like hells and bells. You've got mono rhyme, echoing the same sound every single line in a poem. A lot of rap uses mono rhyme. Light rhyme, half rhyme, rich rhyme. The list goes on and on. And don't forget my favorite, internal rhyme. That's rhyming not at the end of the line, but in the middles of the line, inside the line or from line to line. All these echoes, close or far, the sounds lead your ear to the sense in your mind. It's just a combination of letters and sounds over here, echoing with the combination of letters and sounds over there. Because poetry has no accompaniment like lyrics and songs have music. Instead, poets have to make their own musical echoes. The wavering, wobbly, reverberating echoes of sounds make the rhymes go round.