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

Broken ode

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

An ode that departs from traditional strophic or thematic unity, often mixing lyric, narrative, and dramatic modes; it allows greater freedom, personal voice, and formal experimentation within the ode tradition.

Detailed Definition
A broken ode is a modern or postmodern adaptation of the classical ode that deliberately fractures traditional strophic patterns, elevated diction, or thematic unity to reflect psychological disarray or cultural critique; examples include W.H. Auden’s irregular meditations or Adrienne Rich’s politically charged, non-linear odes.
Example
Example in poetry:
Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” shifts between lyrical reflection and philosophical questioning without formal stanza breaks; Plath’s “Daddy” moves abruptly between nursery rhyme and historical trauma; Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” fractures ode conventions through digressive thought; Bishop’s “The Moose” blends narrative and meditative modes in an irregular ode-like form
Additional Notes
A broken ode deliberately fractures traditional ode structure (strophe-antistrophe-epode) through irregular stanzas, disrupted meter, or fragmented thought—used by Romantic and modern poets (e.g., Keats, Neruda) to convey emotional or philosophical instability.
Also Known As
Fragmented ode irregular ode deconstructed ode modernist ode Fragmented hymn
Skip to main content