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

Hudibrastic Verse

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

Satirical poetry in rhymed octosyllabic couplets with unexpected rhymes

Detailed Definition
Hudibrastic verse, named after Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, employs rhymed iambic tetrameter (octosyllabic) couplets with deliberately clumsy or comic rhymes (e.g., “frown”/“drown”). It thrives on bathos and irony, mocking pretension through mismatched diction and absurd pairings, making it a staple of 17th-century English satirical poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras” uses Hudibrastic verse: rhymed octosyllabic couplets with witty, satirical content—e.g., “He knew the Bible well, and could / Quote chapter, verse, and all things good”; Alexander Pope occasionally employed Hudibrastic tone in satires like “The Dunciad”; A modern imitation: “She claimed her verse was deep and grand, / But all she wrote was canned and bland”; Hudibrastic verse often uses unexpected rhymes for comic effect: “His logic was both sharp and keen— / It cut right through his spleen”; Another example: “He preached of love and peace all day, / Then punched a beggar on the way.”
Additional Notes
Hudibrastic verse uses rhymed octosyllabic (eight-syllable) couplets with a satirical, mock-heroic tone, named after Samuel Butler’s 17th-century poem “Hudibras”; it favors witty, colloquial diction, unexpected rhymes (e.g., “fiddle”/“middle”), and intellectual humor; ideal for social or political satire; differs from heroic couplets (iambic pentameter) in meter and tone; modern practitioners include poets writing light verse or parody; students can use it to practice irony, compression, and comic timing while maintaining strict form.
Also Known As
Hudibrastic Couplet Mock-Heroic Octosyllabics
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