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.

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

Shortened six-foot

Meter
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 incomplete or catalectic variation of a six-foot anapestic line.

Detailed Definition
Shortened six-foot refers to a hexameter line that has been deliberately truncated—typically by omitting one or more syllables from the final foot—to create a sense of abruptness, incompleteness, or rhythmic disruption; this technique may be used to mirror psychological states or to subvert classical expectations in modern verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
A hexameter line missing its final syllable: "Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris—" (Vergil, though complete, inspires shortened versions); English imitations like "I sing of arms and of the man who first from Troy—" cut the final foot; Modern poets may write five-and-a-half feet for dramatic pause; "He wandered far, through lands unknown, beneath the sky—" ends abruptly
Additional Notes
This refers to a hexameter (six-foot) line that is somehow metrically incomplete or shorter than a regular hexameter; often a form of Catalectic Hexameter or a line with a truncated final foot.
Also Known As
Abbreviated hexameter reduced six-foot line shortened hexameter Anapestic hexameter catalectic
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