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 M

Masculine caesura

Prosody
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 pause occurring after a stressed syllable in the line of verse

Detailed Definition
A masculine caesura follows an accented or long syllable, creating a more emphatic, stronger break than a feminine caesura. This type of caesura appears frequently in accentual-syllabic meters and classical verse; it reinforces the natural stress patterns of language and often enhances the poem's rhythmic power, creating moments of emphatic punctuation that guide reader attention and emotional interpretation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Shakespeare’s blank verse, masculine caesura appears in lines like “To be, or not to be: that is the question,” where the pause follows a stressed syllable (“be”); In Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit” contains a masculine caesura after “disobedience”; In Pope’s heroic couplets, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan” uses a masculine caesura after “thyself”; In Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” “Would he were fatter! but his lean condition” features a masculine caesura after “fatter”; In Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” “I am become a name; for always roaming” shows a masculine caesura after “name”; In classical Latin hexameter, a masculine caesura occurs after the first syllable of the third foot when it’s long, as in Virgil’s “Arma virumque cano, | Troiae qui primus ab oris”.
Additional Notes
Masculine caesura is a metrical pause that follows a stressed (strong) syllable, typically occurring in the middle of a line (e.g., in iambic pentameter: "To be | or not to be"). It creates a strong, decisive break and is common in English heroic couplets and dramatic verse. Masculine caesura contrasts with feminine caesura, which follows an unstressed syllable and feels softer. Recognizing caesura types helps in analyzing a poem’s rhythmic architecture and rhetorical pacing. Often paired with end-stopped lines for emphatic effect.
Also Known As
strong caesura
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