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

Meter

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

The structured pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (or long and short in classical verse) that creates rhythmic foundation in poetry.

Explore this topic in depth (5)

The Ghazal: A Guide to Its Form, History, and Music — The ghazal is a lyric form built from autonomous couplets, recurring sound, and meaningful leaps. This guide introduces its Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English-language histories and shows how to hear its distinctive pattern.

How to Read Poetry Aloud — Reading poetry aloud is not about sounding theatrical. It is a way of listening more closely to how sentences, lines, rhythms, sounds and silences work together.

Tanka — Tanka is a short Japanese poem traditionally patterned 5–7–5–7–7, though its units are morae rather than English syllables. Its small scale can hold a striking movement: from scene to feeling, statement to response, or one image to another.

How to Scan a Poem — Scansion is the practice of listening closely to a poem’s rhythm and marking its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is not a way of forcing every line into a formula, but a method for hearing how regularity, variation and natural speech work together.

Ballad — Ballads tell memorable stories in a compact, musical form. Rooted in oral tradition but endlessly reshaped on the printed page, they use rhythm, repetition and dramatic scenes to make narratives travel.

Detailed Definition
Metre is the rhythmic backbone of much traditional poetry, organizing lines into repeating feet (e.g., iambic pentameter) to create musicality and expectation; as a constraint, it shapes diction, syntax, and phrasing to conform to prosodic rules, influencing everything from Shakespearean drama to sonnets, and remains central to poetic form even when deliberately subverted in free verse movements.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 uses iambic pentameter as meter; Emily Dickinson’s hymn stanzas alternate iambic tetrameter and trimeter; Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” uses free verse meter based on breath; Contemporary poet Tracy K. Smith uses irregular meter in “The United States Welcomes You”; Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” uses iambic tetrameter; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” mixes nursery rhyme meter with free verse.

Metre examples: iambic pentameter in Shakespeare (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”); trochaic tetrameter in Poe’s “The Raven”; anapestic trimeter in Dr. Seuss; dactylic hexameter in Longfellow’s “Evangeline”; spondaic emphasis in Hopkins (“Carrion comfort”); free verse rejecting metre for organic rhythm.
Additional Notes
Meter: The structured pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse; includes iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic; essential for traditional prosody but often subverted in free verse.

Metre is rhythmic structure—iambs, trochees, etc. Students must master scansion. Metre shapes emotion and tradition; free verse reacts against it. It’s foundational to poetic craft across cultures.
Also Known As
Prosody Rhythm pattern Metrical structure Verse measure Rhythm Metre prosody Mètre rithim
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