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

Ballad

Form
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 narrative poem, often in quatrains with alternating tetrameter and trimeter, frequently with refrain.

Explore this topic in depth (2)

Protest Poetry — Protest poetry responds to injustice, violence, exclusion or threatened ways of life, but it is more than a political slogan in verse. This guide explores its history, its formal tools and the attentive reading needed to hear both its public claims and its human complexity.

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Detailed Definition
Ballad: A narrative poem that tells a story, often of a dramatic or folkloric nature. Ballads were traditionally transmitted orally and were popular as songs. They are typically plot-driven, focusing on action and dialogue rather than on the inner emotional states of the characters. Ballads are usually composed in quatrains (four-line stanzas) and frequently use an ABAB or ABCB rhyme scheme. The meter is often a mixture of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter (four feet and three feet, respectively), a rhythm known as "common meter". This alternation of longer and shorter lines creates a memorable, sing-song rhythm ideal for storytelling. Classic examples include Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and traditional folk ballads like "Barbara Allen". The Romantic era saw a revival of interest in the ballad form, with poets like Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron writing their own imitations of the folk ballad style.
Example
Example in poetry:
A ballad is a narrative poem often with quatrains and alternating iambic tetrameter/trimeter; example: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three.”
Additional Notes
Ballad is a narrative poem often in quatrains with alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, featuring rhyme (ABCB) and a folkloric or dramatic story; traditional ballads use repetition and refrain for oral transmission.
Also Known As
literary ballad folk ballad amhrán laoi
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