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 E

Epopee

French
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 long narrative poem celebrating the exploits of a hero or a people, blending history, myth, and the marvelous.

Detailed Definition
The épopée is one of the most ambitious genres in the Western tradition, combining heroic narration, mythic scope, and a vision of human destiny. In France, the chansons de geste are its medieval form, while Renaissance poets sought to revive classical epic models. Victor Hugo's La Légende des siècles reinvents the genre as an epic of humanity. The épopée employs elevated style, epic similes, and supernatural intervention to raise human action to the scale of founding myth and collective memory.
Example
Example in poetry:
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey provided important models for French épopée, including the invocation of the Muse, the in medias res opening, and epic similes. Ronsard's unfinished Franciade attempted to create a national French epic tracing France's origins to a Trojan hero. Voltaire's Henriade celebrates Henri IV while advocating religious tolerance, and Hugo's La Légende des siècles creates a modern epic through fragments spanning human history.
Additional Notes
Épopée is central to French ideas of heroism, collective identity, and historical myth. Students may compare medieval chansons de geste with more consciously literary epics such as the Franciade and Henriade. Key features include elevated style, large-scale action, supernatural intervention, and cultural memory. The genre also raises questions about nationalism, ideology, and whose stories are canonised as heroic narratives. The French word is normally written "épopée". The unaccented form "Epopee" may be used in databases or systems that require an ASCII-compatible term.
Also Known As
Epic
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