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

Conte

French
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 short narrative in verse or prose, often fantastic, moral, or comic in character. The verse conte flourished in the French Renaissance and 18th century as a vehicle for wit and moral reflection.

Detailed Definition
The conte in its verse form is a narrative genre combining the pleasure of storytelling with the formal elegance of poetry. La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers are the supreme French examples, adapting Boccaccio and Ariosto with characteristic wit, irony, and narrative economy. The 18th century saw a flowering of the philosophical conte in prose with Voltaire. The conte poétique allows for greater imaginative freedom than strictly lyric genres, accommodating fantasy, comedy, moral satire, and pathos within a narrative frame that remains fundamentally a vehicle for the poet's voice and perspective.
Example
Example in poetry:
La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers adapt stories from Boccaccio and Ariosto into French verse tales characterized by elegant irony, suggestive indirection, and the pleasures of sophisticated narrative told with poetic economy; Voltaire's conte philosophique Candide, though in prose, exemplifies the genre's use of narrative fiction as a vehicle for philosophical satire, with the story's picaresque adventures serving as illustrations of Pangloss's absurd optimism; Perrault's verse tales, collected in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, demonstrate how the fairy tale conte can be versified with moral appendices that wittily complicate the apparent simplicity of the narrative; A student writing a verse conte might adapt a contemporary news story into a narrative poem of ten to fifteen stanzas, practicing the art of telling a story with economy, pace, and the kind of moral or emotional insight that distinguishes literary narrative from mere reportage; Marie de France's lais are verse contes in the medieval tradition, short narrative poems of 100 to 1000 lines telling stories of love, magic, and transformation with a psychological sophistication that belies their compact form; The verse conte's fundamental challenge is maintaining narrative momentum while achieving lyric density: unlike the novel, the verse tale cannot afford expansive description or digression but must create character, atmosphere, and moral insight through the compression of verse.
Additional Notes
Conte in French literary tradition ranges from light verse narratives to philosophical or satirical tales, so context determines meaning. Verse contes flourished particularly in the eighteenth century, where wit, irony, and moral play were prized. Students should distinguish conte from broader narrative poetry such as poésie narrative or epic forms. Fantastic contes may also overlap with fairy-tale traditions. The genre is especially useful for studying tone shifts, narrator reliability, and how brevity can sharpen irony or moral ambiguity.
Also Known As
Tale Narrative tale
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