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 C

Canto

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 canto is a major subdivision of a long narrative or epic poem, analogous to a chapter in prose, often marked by thematic unity.

Detailed Definition
Canto: A major division or subsection within a long narrative poem or an epic. The word is Italian for "song" or "chant." Cantos are analogous to chapters in a novel or acts in a play, serving to organize a large and complex work into more manageable sections. Epics such as Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (divided into Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each comprising cantos) and Ezra Pound's Cantos are structured using this unit of division. The use of cantos allows the poet to develop multiple episodes, characters, and themes over a great length while maintaining a sense of structural coherence for the reader. It is a key feature of the epic form, enabling the telling of vast, sweeping stories on a monumental scale.
Example
Example in poetry:
Canto is a section of a long poem: Dante’s “Divine Comedy” divides into 100 cantos; Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” use the form for historical collage; contemporary poets like Derek Walcott (“Omeros”) adapt canto for postcolonial epic; the canto allows modular exploration of themes; it differs from chapters by lyrical rather than narrative segmentation
Additional Notes
Canto is a major division of a long poem, akin to a chapter; used in epics (e.g., Dante’s Divine Comedy) and modern sequences (e.g., Pound’s Cantos) to organize thematic or narrative segments.
Also Known As
Division section book division major poem section
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