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 H

Half-line

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

Portion of verse line separated by caesura, common in Old English poetry

Detailed Definition
Half-line: A metrical unit consisting of half a full line, often separated by caesura in long-line poetry or used as independent structural element. Half-lines appear prominently in Old English and Old Norse poetry where caesura divides long alliterative lines into distinct hemistichs. Understanding half-line structure is essential for analyzing alliterative verse where each half-line contains specific stress and alliteration patterns. Half-lines demonstrate how larger metrical units can contain internal structure, with lines consisting of paired but distinct subunits that create complex rhythmic and semantic relationships.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Anglo-Saxon poetry, half-line (hemistich) appears in “Beowulf”: “Hwæt! We Gardena / in geardagum”; In Ezra Pound’s “The Seafarer,” half-line mimics Old English alliterative verse; In W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles,” half-line creates stark imagery; In Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercian Hymns,” half-line excavates historical fragments; In Seamus Heaney’s “North,” half-line echoes Norse and Anglo-Saxon roots; In contemporary poet Alice Oswald’s “Memorial,” half-line lists fallen soldiers with Homeric grace.
Additional Notes
Half-line consists of a hemistich or partial verse line, often appearing in Anglo-Saxon poetry where caesura divides lines into two balanced half-lines. This creates distinctive rhythmic units and emphasizes pauses.
Also Known As
half-verse hemistich broken line divided line Alliterative hemistich Hemiepes Verse half Hémistiche
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