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.

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 villanelle

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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 villanelle structured around storytelling rather than lyrical meditation

Detailed Definition
Narrative villanelle is a poem that adapts the strict 19-line villanelle form—two refrains, ABA rhyme—to tell a story, using the repetitive structure to convey obsession, inevitability, or cyclical trauma; though challenging due to the form’s constraints, it succeeds when refrains evolve in meaning, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” where the repeated “lose” traces a narrative arc from trivial to devastating loss.
Example
Example in poetry:
Narrative villanelle: Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” subtly narrates a series of losses culminating in personal grief; Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” recounts a son’s plea amid his father’s dying; Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill” evokes a ghostly family history through repetition; contemporary poet A.E. Stallings uses the villanelle in “Sestina: Like” to narrate digital-age longing; Julia Alvarez’s “Bilingual Sestina” (adapted to villanelle constraints) traces immigrant identity; Terrance Hayes’s “Villanelle for Our Time” layers political narrative within the form’s refrains.
Additional Notes
Narrative villanelle adapts the villanelle’s refrains to tell a story, with repetition marking key plot points. Related to contrapuntal villanelle. Track how refrains evolve—each return should advance the narrative, not just echo.
Also Known As
Story-villanelle Narrative refrain poem Villanelle narration Historical villanelle
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