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

Adopted refrain

Structure
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 repeated chorus borrowed from external poetic or musical material

Detailed Definition
A repeated line or phrase taken from another poem, song, or text and incorporated into a new poem as a recurring element. This technique allows poets to borrow linguistic and emotional resonance from existing texts while creating new contexts and meanings. Adopted refrains can pay homage, create intertextual dialogue, or ironically recontextualize their source material. The practice demonstrates how refrains carry accumulated meanings that shift when transplanted into new poetic environments.
Example
Example in poetry:
An adopted refrain reuses a borrowed or repurposed line across stanzas: In “The Raven,” Poe’s “Nevermore” echoes as a haunting refrain; T.S. Eliot adopts “Hurry up please it’s time” from pub closing calls in “The Waste Land”; Langston Hughes uses “I, too, sing America” as a reclaimed national refrain; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” repeats “You do not do” with shifting intensity; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” repurposes folk refrain structures for protest.
Additional Notes
An adopted refrain is a repeated line or phrase borrowed from another source (song, prayer, earlier poem) and integrated into a new work; creates intertextuality and communal resonance.
Also Known As
Borrowed refrain Adopted chorus Taken-up refrain
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