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 F

Fleet verse

Form
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 brief poem marked by light, rapid rhythm and concise phrasing, evoking swiftness, agility, or fleeting motion in both form and content.

Detailed Definition
Fleet verse denotes poetry characterized by rapid, light-footed rhythm, often using short lines, enjambment, and minimal punctuation to create a sense of speed, agility, or breathless immediacy; associated with youthful energy, spontaneity, or fleeting impressions, this style appears in e.e. cummings’s typographical experiments or in haiku-inspired English poems where concision and motion merge to capture transient moments.
Example
Example in poetry:
Nursery rhymes like "Hey Diddle Diddle" use quick, light meter; Ogden Nash’s humorous quatrains gallop with irregular but fleet rhythm; e.e. cummings’s playful poems like "in Just-" skip with childlike speed; Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" uses brisk anapests for adventure; Dorothy Parker’s witty epigrams move with conversational swiftness.
Additional Notes
Fleet verse uses rapid, light-footed meter (often anapestic or dactylic tetrameter) to convey speed, agility, or whimsy—e.g., Lear’s limericks or Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib.” It relies on minimal caesura, enjambment, and open vowels. Students should note how pace affects tone: is it playful, urgent, or ironic? Contrast with “marching verse,” which emphasizes weight and regularity.
Also Known As
Swift verse Light-footed lyric Rapid stanza Fleeting composition Racing meter Running verse
Skip to main content