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

Sea shanty

Genre
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 work song traditionally sung by sailors to coordinate labor and maintain morale

Detailed Definition
A sea shanty is a traditional work song sung by sailors to coordinate labor aboard ships, characterized by strong rhythmic patterns, call-and-response structure, and repetitive refrains; though originally functional, shanties have influenced modern poetry through their oral cadence, communal voice, and nautical themes, inspiring poets to adopt their robust meter and collective ethos in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Drunken Sailor" is a classic sea shanty with call-and-response structure: “Way hay and up she rises”; “Blow the Man Down” uses rhythmic, work-song cadence for hauling sails; Stan Rogers’s “Barrett’s Privateers” modernizes the shanty form with narrative and maritime detail; Traditional capstan shanties like “Haul Away, Joe” demonstrate functional sea shanty rhythm
Additional Notes
Sea shanty is a type of folk song or chant traditionally sung by sailors, characterized by a strong, simple rhythm (often in D U D or D U U meter) and a call-and-response structure, designed to coordinate the rhythm of work tasks on a ship.
Also Known As
Sailor’s shanty nautical chant sea work song Chantey Shantey
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