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

anchor

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

Anchor means to secure something firmly in place; in poetry, it can suggest a stabilizing image, idea, or line that holds a poem together.

Detailed Definition
In literal use, an anchor keeps a vessel from drifting. In poetry, the word often becomes a metaphor for whatever fixes a poem in memory or gives it steadiness, such as a repeated phrase, a central image, or a grounded emotional truth. It belongs in craft language because it evokes structure, support, and hold.
Example
Example in poetry:
A sonnet's closing couplet often anchors the poem's argument, resolving the octave's tension, as in Shakespeare's sonnets; Seamus Heaney anchors many poems in the physical labor of bog and soil to ground abstract themes in place; A poet may anchor a free verse piece with a repeated image, such as a house or a river, that returns throughout; In elegy, the deceased's name or a specific memory often anchors the emotional arc of the poem; A poet writing about displacement might anchor the poem in a single concrete object carried across borders; Anchoring a poem in a specific historical date can ground otherwise lyrical or abstract language in reality.
Additional Notes
Anchor is a metaphor borrowed from nautical language and widely used in craft discussions to describe an image, phrase, or line that stabilizes a poem's meaning, especially in free verse where formal structures like meter cannot provide that stability; anchoring imagery is particularly important in poems that shift between abstraction and concreteness, since a well-placed anchor gives readers a fixed point to return to amid more elusive language; this term is closely related to the concept of a controlling image or central metaphor, and instructors often ask students to identify a poem's anchor as an exercise in understanding structural coherence.
Other Meanings of “anchor”
Also Known As
secure fix fasten attach moor fixative
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