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

prescriptive phrase

Phrase
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

prescriptive phrase|A poetic statement that dictates how one should act, think, or feel, carrying an imperative or moralizing tone, often reflecting a didactic purpose or societal norms.

Detailed Definition
Prescriptive phrases carry moral or aesthetic authority, common in neoclassical or didactic verse; they instruct rather than describe, shaping reader behavior through command, exemplum, or normative ideals of virtue, beauty, or order.
Example
Example in poetry:
Biblical command gives a classic prescriptive model: “Thou shalt not steal,” where obligation is expressed as law; Kipling’s “If—” repeatedly instructs its reader—“If you can keep your head”—using advice to build an ethical ideal; In Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” “when the sun rises we are afraid” shifts toward urgent collective counsel and survival practice; A climate poem might command, “Keep the river’s name in your mouth; do not call the flood inevitable”; Prescriptive phrasing can sound authoritative, caring, ironic, or oppressive depending on who gives the command and who must obey it
Additional Notes
Prescriptive phrases dictate moral, behavioral, or aesthetic norms: “Thou shalt not steal,” “Write only what the soul demands”; they function as poetic imperatives, often rooted in religious, ethical, or artistic traditions; use them to establish authority, invoke tradition, or challenge societal norms; avoid didacticism—ground them in concrete imagery or personal voice; related to imperative phrase, hortatory phrase, and obligatory phrase; powerful in manifestos, elegies, and spiritual verse where voice carries moral weight.
Also Known As
prescriptive language imperative phrase normative phrase
Skip to main content