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

Hendecasyllable

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 metrical line of eleven syllables, common in classical Latin and Italian poetry, and occasionally adapted in English prosody.

Detailed Definition
The endecasyllable is a metrical constraint central to Italian (e.g., Petrarch) and Spanish poetic traditions, analogous to the English iambic pentameter; its eleven-syllable structure provides rhythmic regularity while allowing flexibility in stress patterns, shaping sonnets, canzoni, and other forms—poets adopt this constraint to engage with classical prosody, cultural heritage, or to impose disciplined musicality on lyrical expression.
Example
Example in poetry:
Hendecasyllable: Catullus 60: “O fur, O moechus, O perjurus!” uses 11-syllable urgency; Italian sonnets often open with hendecasyllabic lines; Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” stanzas blend hendecasyllables; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” adapts hendecasyllabic rhythm in English; Modern lyric: “The clock ticks eleven syllables of silence”; Derek Walcott’s Caribbean verse fuses hendecasyllable with Creole cadence

Endecasyllable (11-syllable line): Italian hendecasyllable in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”; Spanish “endecasílabo” in Garcilaso de la Vega; French alexandrine adapted to 11 syllables; modern poets like James Merrill use endecasyllabic blank verse; constraint poets count syllables strictly per line; cross-linguistic endecasyllabic experiments in translation.
Additional Notes
11-syllable line. Italian endecasillabo, Polish jedenastozgłoskowiec standard. Related: hendecasyllabic, syllabic meter. Study: how languages handle 11-syllable lines differently.

Endecasyllable is the 11-syllable line dominant in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese poetry (e.g., Dante). Students should study its rhythmic flexibility—unlike English iambic pentameter, it’s syllabic, not accentual. Essential for cross-linguistic poetic study.
Also Known As
Eleven-syllable line hendecameter 11-syllable verse Hendecadactyl Endecasyllable
Skip to main content