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

Distich

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 two-line poetic unit—rhymed or unrhymed—that forms a complete syntactic and semantic thought, often used in epigrams or distichs.

Detailed Definition
A Distich is a two-line poetic unit, often a self-contained epigram or couplet, that presents a complete thought with syntactic and rhythmic closure; originating in Greek and Latin epigrammatic tradition, distichs balance concision with wit or wisdom, as in the moral couplets of Martial or the aphoristic lyrics of Alexander Pope, where brevity sharpens insight.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” “A little learning is a dang’rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” forms a moral distich; In Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul,” metaphor and definition form a lyrical distich; In Kay Ryan’s “Turtle,” “Her only levity / is patience” creates a paradoxical distich; In Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” “may you kiss / the wind” forms a benedictory distich; In W.S. Merwin’s late work, “no names / but this one” uses absence and presence in distich form.
Additional Notes
Distich is a two-line stanza, often a couplet with rhyme or parallel structure; it’s foundational in epigrams, didactic poetry, and Persian forms like the ghazal’s opening couplet (matla).
Also Known As
Couplet Two-line stanza Verse pair Binary unit Paired poem Rhyming distich rhyming pair Two-line unit
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