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.

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

Cross-sensory imagery

Imagery
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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

Imagery that blends or conflates different sensory experiences (e.g., sound with color)

Explore this topic in depth (3)

Symbolist Poetry — Symbolist poetry invites readers to attend to atmosphere, association and music as carefully as to narrative or argument. This guide traces the movement’s late nineteenth-century origins and offers a practical way to read poems whose meanings emerge through pattern rather than simple decoding.

Imagery in Poetry — Imagery is the sensory language that helps a poem be felt as well as understood. This guide explains how to recognise different kinds of imagery and explore what they do without rushing past the words into interpretation.

Nature Poetry — Nature poetry is not simply poetry with scenery in it. Across centuries and cultures, poets have used birds, weather, gardens, oceans, seasons and stars to test what it means to be human—and to meet a world that may not be human-centred at all.

Detailed Definition
Cross-sensory imagery is a poetic technique that merges distinct sensory experiences—such as describing a sound as “velvet” (touch + hearing) or a color as “loud” (sight + sound)—to create vivid, synesthetic impressions; it deepens emotional impact by engaging multiple perceptual channels simultaneously and is distinct from simple metaphor by implying actual sensory fusion rather than comparison.
Example
Example in poetry:
"The crimson thunder tasted of iron"; "Her laughter was a golden light that warmed my skin"; "I heard the color of silence"; "The wind smelled like forgotten music"; "His anger burned cold and blue"
Additional Notes
Cross-sensory imagery blends senses (e.g., "a blue note" or "sharp cheese") to evoke synesthetic experience; distinct from metaphor by implying actual sensory fusion; used by Rimbaud ("Voyelles"), Keats, and Plath; students should identify which senses are merged and how this deepens mood or theme; related to "blended perception" and "unconscious pictures"; avoid clichés like "loud shirt" without fresh context.
Also Known As
synesthetic metaphor intermodal description sensory fusion Synaesthesia Synesthesia Synesthetic Imagery
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