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

Mixed rhythm

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

Poetic rhythm that shifts between different metrical patterns or incorporates irregular beats for expressive variation.

Detailed Definition
Mixed rhythm refers to the intentional blending of rhythmic patterns—accentual, syllabic, free, or quantitative—within a poem to create polyrhythmic texture and expressive flexibility; unlike strict meter, mixed rhythm accommodates natural speech cadences, musical influences, or multilingual inflections, as in jazz poetry or Caribbean verse where syncopation and cultural hybridity shape prosody.
Example
Example in poetry:
Mixed rhythm appears in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”—sprung rhythm with iambic base; modern example: Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere” blends hip-hop cadence with free verse; mixed rhythm combines meters for expressive flexibility; T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” shifts rhythms to mirror fragmentation; this technique avoids monotony; it’s central to modern and oral poetry.
Additional Notes
Mixed rhythm blends rising and falling feet or varied stress patterns. Contrast with uniform rising meter. Common in dramatic or modernist verse—read aloud to feel how rhythmic instability mirrors psychological or social flux.
Also Known As
Irregular rhythm Varied cadence Shifting beat Heterorhythmic
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