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 B

Balanced stanza

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 stanza in which lines are metrically, syntactically, or thematically symmetrical or evenly weighted

Detailed Definition
A balanced stanza is a poetic stanza structured with symmetrical line lengths, metrical patterns, or syntactic parallelism that creates a sense of equilibrium and formal harmony, often used to convey stability, resolution, or thematic unity, as seen in quatrains with alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter in traditional ballads.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” heroic couplets like “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance” show metrically and thematically balanced stanzas; In Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the quatrain “Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village though; / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow” exhibits syntactic and rhythmic balance; In William Blake’s “The Tyger,” each stanza maintains parallel structure and symmetrical phrasing: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night”; In Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” the villanelle stanzas are balanced in tone, meter, and emotional weight.
Additional Notes
A balanced stanza features symmetrical line lengths, metrical patterns, or thematic elements across its structure, promoting harmony and closure; useful in traditional forms like quatrains or couplets where equilibrium reinforces thematic resolution.
Also Known As
Symmetrical stanza harmonized stanza equilibrial stanza mirrored stanza Harmonic stanza
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