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

Choriamb

Meter
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 metrical foot of four syllables: long-short-short-long (– ˘ ˘ –), common in Greek choral poetry

Detailed Definition
The choriamb (– ˘ ˘ –) is a classical foot named for its use in choral odes, combining a trochee and an iamb into a symmetrical, rocking rhythm; its balanced structure evokes solemnity or ceremonial tone, and though infrequent in English, it appears in Pindaric odes or Victorian imitations seeking archaic grandeur or liturgical cadence.
Example
Example in poetry:
A Choriamb is a metrical foot with the pattern long-short-short-long (— ∪ ∪ —), as in the line: “Over the sea to Skye,” where “Over the sea” approximates the rhythm (stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed).

Choriambic meter (– u u –) appears in Pindar’s victory odes: “Golden lyre, you rule Apollo’s choir”; Horace uses choriambic dimeters in Odes 1.24: “Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus”; In English, Tennyson’s “Boadicea” echoes choriambic grandeur: “Came a day when the cloud was lifted”; The choriamb often forms the core of Aeolic verse like the Sapphic stanza; Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon” employs choriambic rhythms for solemnity; Choriambic lines convey stately, processional movement suitable for hymns.
Additional Notes
Four-syllable metrical foot combining trochee and iamb (long-short-short-long), creating complex rocking rhythm. Rare in English due to stress-based prosody. Common in Greek and Latin quantitative verse.

Choriambic: A foot of four syllables with the pattern long–short–short–long (– u u –), central to Aeolic meters like the Sapphic stanza; it combines trochaic and iambic motion, creating a wave-like rhythm; recognizing choriambic structure is key to analyzing lyric poetry’s musicality.
Also Known As
Double-short foot long-short-short-long choriambic foot ¯˘˘¯ meter Choriambic
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