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

Frame Narrative

Technique
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 story-within-a-story structure where an outer narrative encloses inner poetic tales or reflections.

Detailed Definition
Frame narratives, seen in Arabian Nights adaptations, layer tales within a framing device; in poetry, they appear to explore multiple viewpoints, comment on storytelling itself, and build epic scale, enriching metafictional depth and reader engagement.
Example
Example in poetry:
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" uses Wedding Guest's encounter as frame for mariner's tale; The Arabian Nights employs Scheherazade's nightly storytelling as frame containing hundreds of nested stories; Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales frames individual tales within pilgrimage journey structure; A frame narrative might present poem as manuscript found in attic or story told at gathering; Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights uses multiple frame narrators to create distance and perspective; Frame narratives allow poets to explore reliability, memory, and the nature of storytelling itself
Additional Notes
Frame narrative employs a story-within-a-story structure where an outer narrative encloses one or more inner tales, creating layered temporal and perspectival complexity. This ancient technique appears in works like The Arabian Nights, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Boccaccio's Decameron, where a frame situation motivates embedded storytelling. In poetry, frame narratives allow multiple voices, perspectives, and temporal layers while maintaining structural coherence. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" uses a wedding guest as frame listener, making readers witnesses to witnessing. The technique enables poets to examine storytelling itself—how tales are transmitted, transformed, and received. Frames can be simple (a speaker recounting an overheard story) or elaborately nested (stories within stories within stories). Modern poets employ frame narratives to explore memory, testimony, and the reliability of narration. Students should analyze the relationship between frame and embedded narratives: do they mirror each other, create ironic contrast, or complicate interpretation? Understanding frame narratives helps readers recognize how poems stage their own telling and question the nature of narrative authority.
Also Known As
Frame Story Framed Narrative Embedded Narrative Story Within a Story Story within poem
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