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 S

Sapphic Villanelle

Form
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 hybrid poetic form combining the repetitive structure of a villanelle with stanzas modeled on Sapphic meter rather than tercets.

Detailed Definition
Sapphic Villanelle is a rare hybrid form that merges the structural repetition of the villanelle with the metrical and stanzaic conventions of Sapphic verse—traditionally composed of three long lines followed by a shorter adonic line, often in quantitative meter; while challenging to adapt to English stress-based prosody, this fusion attempts to combine the lyrical intimacy and emotional directness associated with Sappho’s fragments with the obsessive, circling quality of the villanelle, resulting in a form that is both musically intricate and thematically resonant, often exploring love, longing, or temporal flux through layered repetition and classical allusion.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sapphic Villanelle: combines Sapphic stanza (three 11-syllable lines + one 5-syllable) with villanelle repetition; Experimental form by contemporary poets blending classical meter with obsessive refrain; Example refrain: “The moon returns” in 5-syllable line, repeated per villanelle rules; Rare hybrid—used to evoke ancient longing within modern cyclic grief
Additional Notes
Sapphic Villanelle fuses Sapphic meter with villanelle's repetition structure. Highly experimental hybrid. Requires mastery of both forms. Compare standard versions. Technical challenge for advanced poets.
Also Known As
Sapphic nineteen-liner Greek lyric villanelle Lesbian Isle villanelle Sappho's villanelle
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