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 O

o'er

Archaic Terms
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 poetic contraction of "over," meaning above or across; frequently used to maintain meter and create a flowing, archaic sound in verse.

Detailed Definition
O'er is a common elision of "over," favored in poetry for its brevity and euphonic quality that aids scansion and rhyme. From Shakespeare to Shelley and beyond, it appears in descriptions of motion, dominion, or emotional transcendence, lending fluidity and musicality to lines that might otherwise feel cumbersome. Its prevalence in traditional forms underscores a commitment to sonic elegance and historical continuity. Poets employ "o'er" to compress phrasing, heighten lyricism, and evoke the elevated register associated with canonical English verse traditions.
Example
Example in poetry:
O'er: Poetic: "Memories hover o'er the quiet grave."; Definition-based: "O'er" is a poetic elision of "over," used to preserve metrical count in verse by dropping a syllable; Classical usage: Ballads and hymns, including "The Star-Spangled Banner," rely on "o'er" to fit the line's rhythm, as in "o'er the ramparts we watched"; Exercise: Rewrite a two-syllable phrase using "o'er" to compress it into a single stressed syllable for meter; Craft tip: Elisions like "o'er," "e'er," and "ne'er" are tools of poetic economy, not mere archaism, and remain useful in strict metrical forms like the sonnet; Contemporary note: Modern poets writing in traditional forms occasionally revive "o'er" when strict iambic count demands it.
Additional Notes
O'er, a contraction of over, streamlines poetic flow for meter and euphony, ubiquitous in ballads and hymns to suggest transcendence or traversal, as in Longfellow. It maintains archaic elegance without syllable bloat, relating to other elisions like ne'er; tip for professors: Scan lines with o'er to demonstrate prosody rules—students can rewrite prose descriptions using it to feel its rhythmic enhancement in elevated, flowing narratives of journey or dominion.
Also Known As
Over Oer
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