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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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 meter

Meter
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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 metrical system based on counting stressed syllables per line rather than total syllables

Detailed Definition
A metrical system based on counting stressed syllables per line regardless of the total syllable count or the number of unstressed syllables between stresses. This contrasts with syllabic meter, which counts all syllables, and accentual-syllabic meter, which counts both stresses and total syllables in patterned feet. Accentual meter characterizes much Germanic poetry including Old English verse and survives in English folk forms. The system allows flexibility while maintaining rhythmic regularity through stress recurrence, creating emphatic, driving rhythms.
Example
Example in poetry:
Old English “Beowulf” uses accentual meter with four stresses per line and alliteration; “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” relies on strong beats rather than syllable count; Nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock” prioritize stress over syllabic regularity; Modern poets like Heaney revive accentual meter to echo Anglo-Saxon oral tradition; Accentual meter appears in folk ballads such as “Barbara Allen,” where stress drives narrative pace.
Additional Notes
Accentual meter counts only stressed syllables per line, ignoring unstressed ones; prevalent in Germanic and early English verse, it contrasts with syllabic or accentual-syllabic meters like iambic pentameter.
Also Known As
Stress meter Strong-stress pattern Accent rhythm Accent verse Accentual verse Dolnik verse stress-based meter
Skip to main content