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 P

Phantom line

Device
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

An implied but unwritten line suggested by context, rhythm, or expectation, creating tension between presence and absence in the poetic fabric.

Detailed Definition
A verse line implied by a poem's structure or meter but not actually written, creating ghostly presence through absence. Phantom lines can result from deletion, censorship, or deliberate structural choices that leave gaps in expected patterns, forcing readers to imagine what is missing or creating tension between expected form and actual text, common in experimental poetry exploring absence, silence, or the limits of representation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Emily Dickinson’s dashes, the phantom line exists between “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” and the imagined silence after; Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” implies a phantom line in the pause before “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”; W.S. Merwin’s un-punctuated poems like “Separation” (“Your absence has gone through me”) suggest phantom lines in breath gaps; Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” uses line breaks like “I am your opus, / I am your valuable” to imply phantom continuities; Contemporary poet Ocean Vuong leaves phantom lines in white space between stanzas of “Aubade with Burning City”; Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats” uses enjambment to create phantom lines of spiritual passage.
Additional Notes
Line suggested by structure or meter but not written. Creates ghostly presence through absence. Related to deleted or censored lines. Common in experimental poetry.
Also Known As
Ghost line Absent verse Implied line Invisible measure Eidolon Line
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