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

Ballade

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 French fixed-form poem with three stanzas and an envoi, all ending with the same refrain, typically in octosyllabic lines.

Detailed Definition
Ballade: A specific medieval and modern poetic form that was especially popular in France during the 14th and 15th centuries. It is a closed form, meaning it has a strict and prescribed structure. A typical ballade consists of three main stanzas, each of the same length and with the same rhyme scheme, followed by a shorter concluding section called an "envoi" (or "refrain"). The rhymes and the opening line of the first stanza are repeated at the end of the second and third stanzas, and the envoi incorporates these same repeated elements. The structure is highly constrained, making it a difficult form to write in English. The ballade is often used for serious or satirical subjects. François Villon is one of the most famous practitioners of the form. The structure of the ballade showcases the intricate formal experimentation of medieval French poetry and serves as a model for other fixed forms that rely on repetition and a clear division between stanzas and a concluding section.
Example
Example in poetry:
A ballade is a French form with three octaves and an envoi, same rhyme throughout; example: Chaucer’s “Ballade of Gentilesse”: “Rewulle your lust, your appetit bridle…” (all stanzas end in “-le” sounds).
Additional Notes
Ballade is a French fixed form with three stanzas (usually eight lines each) and a four-line envoi, all ending with the same refrain; it demands intricate rhyme schemes and was mastered by Villon and later English poets like Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Also Known As
French fixed form three-stanza poem with envoi medieval French verse form ballade form Ballade royale
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