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

Cyclic utterance

Structure
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 recurring statement or motif that circles back to its starting point

Detailed Definition
Cyclic utterance describes a poetic line or phrase that loops back upon itself thematically or syntactically, creating a sense of eternal recurrence, futility, or meditative stasis; common in existential or mystical poetry (e.g., Eliot’s “Four Quartets” or Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”), this technique uses repetition with variation to evoke timelessness, where beginning and end blur into a continuous, unresolved circle of thought or feeling.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Native American oral poetry, chants often return to a root phrase like "We are the earth"; T.S. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" ends where it begins: "In my beginning is my end"; The circular structure of Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle" returns to "rage, rage against the dying of the light"; Traditional lullabies repeat opening lines at the close to create cyclic utterance; Rumi’s ghazals often end with a return to the opening theme of divine longing.
Additional Notes
Cyclic utterance describes a poem or section that returns to its opening phrase, image, or idea, creating a circular rather than linear structure—evoking mythic time, obsession, or inescapable fate (e.g., Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”). Unlike a simple refrain, the return often carries altered meaning due to intervening context. Students should track how the repeated element accrues new resonance; compare with “cyclical chorus” in dramatic poetry or song cycles.
Also Known As
Circular utterance Recurrent phrase Cyclical refrain Rotational expression recurrent phrase motif recurring chorus line
Skip to main content