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

Actant

Concept
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 structural role in narrative semiotics that performs or undergoes an action in a poem's underlying structure

Detailed Definition
An actant in poetic narrative theory is a functional role or agent that drives the action or thematic development within a poem, derived from Greimas’s actantial model; unlike static characters, actants represent dynamic positions such as the Subject (seeker), Object (goal), Sender (instigator), Receiver (beneficiary), Helper, or Opponent, allowing for structural analysis of how desire, conflict, and transformation unfold even in lyric or fragmented verse, thereby illuminating the underlying dramatic skeleton beneath seemingly non-narrative poetic forms.
Example
Example in poetry:
An actant is a narrative role (e.g., hero, helper, villain) in a poem’s story; in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Mariner is the protagonist actant, the Albatross a symbolic helper, and the Wedding Guest a receiver.
Additional Notes
Actant: Borrowed from narratology (Greimas), refers to a functional role (e.g., subject, object, helper) within a poetic narrative; useful for analyzing dramatic monologues or allegorical poems.
Also Known As
Character element Narrative agent Story actor Structural participant
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