A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Accentual four-beat line

Meter
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poetic line based on four stressed syllables irrespective of unstressed syllable count

Detailed Definition
A verse line governed by the count of stressed syllables rather than total syllables, containing four strong beats regardless of the number of unstressed syllables between them. This meter characterizes much English folk poetry, ballads, and nursery rhymes, where the strong-stress tradition dominates over syllable counting. The form allows great flexibility in syllable count between beats while maintaining rhythmic regularity through the recurrent stress pattern. Four-beat accentual verse creates driving, emphatic rhythm suited to narrative and song.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The king was in his counting house” (nursery rhyme) uses four strong beats per line regardless of syllables; “Tyger Tyger, burning bright” (Blake) exemplifies accentual four-beat with rhythmic intensity; “Break, break, break” (Tennyson) employs four stressed syllables amid variable unstressed ones; In “The Song of Hiawatha,” Longfellow adapts Finnish meter into English accentual four-beat lines; Auden’s “Lullaby” uses four-beat lines to create incantatory rhythm: “Lay your sleeping head, my love.”
Additional Notes
Accentual four-beat line contains four stressed syllables per line, regardless of unstressed syllables; common in Old English and modern folk poetry (e.g., ballads), it prioritizes rhythm over syllable count.
Also Known As
Four-beat stress line Strong-stress verse Tetrameter (accentual) Accentual tetrameter
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