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

Oxymore

French
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 figure of speech combining two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive terms to create a paradoxical expression that captures a complex reality. Common in Baroque and Romantic poetry.

Detailed Definition
The oxymore is a figure of compressed paradox, yolking together two terms that appear logically contradictory to create a third meaning that transcends the contradiction. Classical examples include obscure clarity, bitter sweetness, or living death. Petrarchan love poetry is saturated with oxymorons capturing the contradictory experience of desire. Baroque poetry exploits it for its characteristic tension and complexity. In French Romantic poetry, Hugo uses the oxymoron as a structural principle, building his aesthetic of the sublime and grotesque on the systematic conjunction of opposites that reality refuses to keep separate, reflecting his belief that contradiction is the fundamental law of existence.
Example
Example in poetry:
Hugo's aesthetic theory of the sublime and the grotesque, articulated in the Preface to Cromwell, is itself an extended oxymoron: beauty requires ugliness, the sublime requires the grotesque, and each half of the paradox intensifies the other rather than canceling it out; Petrarchan love poetry is saturated with oxymoron capturing the contradictions of desire: "ma douleur douce," "ma joie cruelle," "ma mort vivante" express through formal paradox the psychological reality of a passion that simultaneously tortures and fulfills; Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal," his title itself an oxymoron, constructs an entire aesthetic around the identification of beauty with corruption, pleasure with pain, and the sacred with the abject, making the oxymoron a structural principle rather than a local ornament; A student constructing an oxymore should find pairs of genuinely contradictory terms whose conjunction reveals a real paradox in experience: "douce violence," "lumière aveuglante," "solitude peuplée" each capture a real experiential paradox that neither term alone could express; Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" is a prose oxymoron, the grammatical impossibility of "I is another" enacting the dissociation of identity that it describes, making the formal violation itself the meaning; The oxymoron tests the reader's tolerance for contradiction: unlike antithesis, which keeps its opposites in separate syntactic positions, the oxymoron fuses them in a single phrase, demanding that the mind hold incompatible qualities simultaneously as a single complex thought.
Additional Notes
Oxymore compresses contradiction into a compact phrase, forcing incompatible concepts into provocative coexistence. French poetry often uses oxymoron to express emotional paradox, metaphysical tension, or conceptual complexity. Students should distinguish it from antithèse, where larger contrasting structures are set against each other rather than fused tightly. Oxymora are especially common in love poetry, mystical writing, and baroque expression. Their interpretive value lies in revealing tensions that resist simple logical resolution.
Also Known As
Oxymoron
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