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

align

Craft Terms
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

Align means to place things in a straight line or in proper relation to one another; in poetry, it can suggest harmony, arrangement, or correspondence among images and ideas.

Detailed Definition
Literally, align describes the act of setting parts into order or matching them carefully. In poetry, it is useful when describing the fitting together of sound, rhythm, image, or argument. The term appears in craft-based poetic language because poems often depend on the deliberate alignment of parts to create balance, clarity, or emphasis.
Example
Example in poetry:
A formalist poet aligns line breaks with syntactic units to reinforce clarity, as in much of Robert Frost's blank verse; Concrete poets align words visually on the page so that form mirrors meaning, as in George Herbert's "Easter Wings"; A ghazal poet aligns the refrain word at the end of each couplet to create unity across the poem; In free verse, a poet may align stresses subtly to create a felt rhythm without strict meter; Villanelle writers align their two repeating refrains so they gain new meaning with each return; A poet might align imagery of light and dark stanza by stanza to build a controlling metaphor.
Additional Notes
Align is a spatial and structural craft term often discussed alongside enjambment, caesura, and visual form, since how words are aligned on the page can reinforce or complicate a poem's meaning; in concrete and visual poetry, alignment becomes a primary compositional tool, while in more traditional verse it often refers to the alignment of stresses, rhymes, or thematic threads across stanzas; students should note that alignment can be both formal, as in meter and rhyme, and thematic, as when a poet aligns two seemingly unrelated images to suggest an implicit comparison, a technique closely related to juxtaposition.
Also Known As
straighten position adjust true level
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