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

Character voice

Concept
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

The distinct tone and speech pattern given to a persona within a poem

Detailed Definition
Character voice in poetry denotes the distinct linguistic, tonal, and perspectival identity of a speaker who is clearly differentiated from the poet, often embodying a specific social role, historical persona, or fictional figure; through diction, syntax, idiom, and worldview, the character voice creates dramatic immediacy, as in Browning’s dramatic monologues (“My Last Duchess”) or Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” where voice becomes the primary vehicle for narrative and psychological revelation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Browning’s "My Last Duchess," the Duke’s arrogant voice reveals his possessiveness; Gwendolyn Brooks’s "We Real Cool" uses teen vernacular to embody youthful rebellion; Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall" gives the neighbor a folksy, repetitive voice: "Good fences make good neighbors"; Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy" channels a childlike yet furious persona; T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" reveals neurotic introspection through hesitant diction.
Additional Notes
Character voice refers to a speaker in a poem whose diction, syntax, and perspective are distinct from the poet’s—central to dramatic monologues (Browning, Eliot) and persona poems. Crafting a convincing character voice requires attention to idiolect, social markers, and psychological nuance. Students should ask: whose voice is this? What biases or blind spots shape it? How does the voice reveal subtext? Related to “monotone composition” if the voice remains static, or “multi-voice poem” if multiple personas interact.
Other Meanings of “Character voice”
Also Known As
Persona voice Dramatic utterance Speaker’s tone Characterized diction Persona poem Persona speech
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