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 D

Dactyl

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 one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables (– ◡ ◡).

Explore this topic in depth (2)

How to Scan a Poem — Scansion is the practice of listening closely to a poem’s rhythm and marking its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is not a way of forcing every line into a formula, but a method for hearing how regularity, variation and natural speech work together.

Metre and Rhythm — Metre gives poetry an underlying pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; rhythm is the living sound that results when a person reads it. Learn to hear the beat before naming it, and to notice how poets use regularity and variation to make language move.

Detailed Definition
A dactyl is a metrical foot of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed (–uu), creating a falling rhythm; prominent in classical hexameter (Homer, Virgil) and English narrative verse (Longfellow’s Evangeline), it evokes grandeur or swiftness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dactyl appears in Longfellow’s “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks”; In Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them”; Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” uses dactylic waves for elegiac rhythm; Modern poet Annie Finch uses dactyls in “Calendars” for ritual cadence; In “The Raven,” Poe’s “Once upon a midnight dreary” opens with dactylic meter.
Additional Notes
Dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (e.g., "merrily"); common in classical Greek and Latin poetry and occasionally used in English for galloping rhythms (e.g., Longfellow’s "Evangeline").
Also Known As
Three-syllable foot Long-short-short measure Falling trisyllabic foot Heroic meter unit
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