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

Hierarchical syntax

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

Sentence structure arranging phrases and clauses in hierarchical dependence for rhetorical or rhythmic effect

Detailed Definition
Hierarchical syntax in poetry organizes clauses and phrases in a clear, top-down structure where main ideas dominate subordinate elements, often using subordinating conjunctions to establish logical or causal relationships; this creates a sense of order, authority, or reasoned progression, contrasting with paratactic or fragmented styles that emphasize equality or simultaneity of ideas.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy uses hierarchical syntax: subordinate clauses build toward existential climax; Milton’s “Paradise Lost” opens with “Of Man’s first disobedience… Sing, Heavenly Muse!” placing divine invocation above human action; In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats subordinates temporal reality to eternal art: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”; Contemporary poet Jorie Graham structures sentences with cascading dependent clauses to mirror cognitive hierarchy; Emily Dickinson’s dashes create syntactic hierarchies where fragmented phrases orbit a central thought; Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” uses minimal hierarchical syntax: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
Additional Notes
Hierarchical syntax arranges clauses to reflect power, logic, or moral order. Related to dependent-clause poem. Often used in philosophical or religious verse—trace how subordination mirrors worldview or argumentative structure.
Also Known As
Nested syntax Tiered grammatical structure Hierarchical clause arrangement Ordered subordination Hypotactic Hypotactic verse
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