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

Stanza

Structure
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 unified group of lines in a poem, separated by space or indentation, functioning as a structural and thematic unit akin to a paragraph in prose.

Explore this topic in depth (5)

How to Read a Poem — Poetry is not a puzzle with one hidden answer that only experts can decode. Begin by noticing what a poem actually does: read it, hear it, question it, and return to it.

How to Compare Poems — Comparing poems is not a matter of making two separate lists. It is a way of seeing how poems ask related questions in distinct voices, shapes and sounds—and of discovering what each poem makes newly visible in the other.

Ode — An ode is not one rigid pattern but a flexible lyric genre in which a speaker gives sustained, heightened attention to a person, object, place, idea or experience. It can praise, question, remember, mourn and think aloud.

Metaphysical Poetry — Metaphysical poetry brings love, faith, science, death and the body into unusually close contact. Its poets—especially John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell—make poems that think aloud, argue fiercely and discover emotional force in surprising comparisons.

Stanzas in Poetry — A stanza is more than a block of lines on a page. Learn how stanza patterns, breaks and repetitions organise a poem—and how those structures can change when the words are spoken or sung.

Detailed Definition
A stanza is a grouped set of lines within a poem, separated by blank lines or indentation, functioning as a structural and thematic unit akin to a paragraph in prose; stanzas vary in length and form (e.g., couplets, tercets, quatrains) and help organize ideas, control pacing, and establish rhythmic or rhyming patterns throughout the poem.
Example
Example in poetry:
A stanza is a grouped set of lines: quatrain (4), tercet (3), couplet (2); In sonnets, 3 quatrains + couplet; In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 5 ten-line stanzas; In haiku, 3-line stanza; Student example: sestet (6-line) stanza on seasons; Another: irregular stanza mimicking breath.
Additional Notes
Stanza: A grouped set of lines in a poem, separated by space; functions like a paragraph in prose; named by line count (couplet, tercet, quatrain, etc.).
Also Known As
Verse paragraph Strophe Verse unit Poetic section Verse Shloka Stance rann
Skip to main content