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

Contour

Craft Terms
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

To give a poem a discernible shape or changing profile through shifts in tone, syntax, image, or sound. Contour lets the reader feel movement across the whole work.

Detailed Definition
Poetic contour is the pattern of rises, falls, bends, and pauses that gives a poem its larger topography. A lyric may begin in clipped statements, widen into flowing sentences, and narrow again at its close; an elegy may move from ordinary objects toward abstraction and back. Attending to contour keeps each line connected to the poem’s total motion, so that local choices contribute to an intelligible emotional and formal landscape.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet contours an image by tracing its changing edges, as a mountain appears first as a dark line and then as snow, trees, and rock; Contouring an emotion lets grief move from numbness to anger to tenderness instead of naming it once; Enjambment can contour a sentence by delaying its key word across the line break; A contoured character is revealed through gestures, habits, and contradictions rather than through a direct description.
Additional Notes
Contour describes the poem’s overall movement, like the profile of a landscape. A poem may rise toward intensity, flatten into reflection, or descend into silence through changes in syntax, line length, imagery, and sound. Studying contour helps writers avoid a monotonous middle. Related ideas include arc, pacing, progression, and structural rhythm.
Other Meanings of “Contour”
Also Known As
Outline Profile
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