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

Dactylic

Adjective
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

Describing a metrical foot composed of one long (stressed) syllable followed by two short (unstressed) syllables (/ uu).

Detailed Definition
Dactylic describes a metrical foot consisting of three syllables, with the first stressed followed by two unstressed (DUM-da-da); it creates a falling rhythm that can sound solemn, lyrical, or even chant-like, famously used in classical Greek and Latin epics such as Homer’s “Iliad.” In English verse, pure dactylic patterns are less common but appear in works like Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” producing a deliberate rolling cadence well suited to epic or tragic themes.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dactylic|"HICKory DICKory DOCK" with hard-soft-soft pattern; One stressed followed by two unstressed syllables; Longfellow's "Evangeline"; "THUNder CRASHing" from children's verse

Dactyllic meter (stressed-unstressed-unstressed): Longfellow’s “Evangeline” (“This is the forest primeval…”); Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“Cannon to right of them”); Whitman’s occasional dactyls for incantatory effect; Greek epics like Homer’s dactylic hexameter; modern dactylic experiments by Annie Finch; dactyls mimic galloping rhythms in war poetry.
Additional Notes
Dactylic meter follows the pattern of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da); it can produce a heavy, solemn, or classical cadence.

Dactyllic meter (stressed + two unstressed: “MER-ri-ly”) drives epic and galloping rhythms. Longfellow’s “Evangeline” is a key example. Students should practice scansion and consider how dactyls convey urgency or grandeur. It contrasts with iambic regularity and suits narrative poetry.
Also Known As
Dactylic verse Three-beat measure Long-short-short pattern Falling triple rhythm Dactyllic
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