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 N

Narrative background

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

Contextual details at the start of a poem that prepare the ground for the unfolding story

Detailed Definition
Narrative background in poetry refers to the implicit or explicit story-world—historical setting, character backstories, cultural context—that undergirds a poem’s immediate action or lyric moment, providing depth, motivation, or irony without overt exposition; skilled poets embed this background through allusion, diction, or symbolic detail (e.g., referencing “the mills” to evoke Industrial Revolution hardship), enabling readers to infer a richer temporal and social matrix, as in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, where racial microaggressions gain power from unspoken histories of systemic violence.
Example
Example in poetry:
Narrative background: In “Beowulf,” the backstory of Grendel’s lineage from Cain explains his monstrous nature; T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” references the Fisher King myth to contextualize postwar desolation; Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” weaves Caribbean colonial history into its Homeric retelling; Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment” alludes to Iron Age bog bodies to frame modern political violence; Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” embeds historical racism as narrative background to everyday microaggressions; Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” implies a duchess’s backstory through the Duke’s ominous monologue.
Additional Notes
Narrative background provides contextual setting or backstory in verse. Related to story setup and plot introduction. Keep concise—embed details through action or dialogue rather than exposition to maintain poetic momentum.
Also Known As
Backstory Contextual frame Poetic prelude Narrative prologue Exposition
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