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.

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

Four-beat line

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 poetic line containing four stressed syllables, common in Anglo-Saxon and ballad meters

Detailed Definition
A four-beat line is a verse line structured around four primary stresses or beats, regardless of total syllable count, common in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, ballads, and modern free verse; it provides a strong, song-like rhythm that balances regularity with flexibility.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day” (Gray’s “Elegy”) is a classic four-beat line (iambic tetrameter); “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (Wordsworth) follows four-beat rhythm; “The way a crow / Shook down on me” (Frost) uses tetrameter; “Whose woods these are I think I know” (Frost) maintains steady four-beat pulse.
Additional Notes
A four-beat line contains four stressed syllables, regardless of total syllables; typical in ballads, hymns, and folk poetry—offers rhythmic stability and oral fluency.
Also Known As
Tetrameter line four-stress verse rhythmic quartet strong-beat line Beat tetrameter Quadruple measure
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