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

Stasis

Prosody
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

In classical rhetoric and poetry, a point where argumentation or narrative pauses or stabilizes

Detailed Definition
Stasis refers to moments where a poem's narrative, argumentation, or emotional trajectory pauses, creating space for reflection, emphasis, or tonal shift. In poetry, recognizing stasis is crucial for understanding how poems structure their emotional and intellectual movements; poets deliberately create stasis points through caesurae, enjambment manipulation, or thematic repetition, guiding readers through their works' complex emotional and philosophical terrain.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Greek tragedy, stasis refers to a stationary choral ode contrasting with movement (kinesis); In poetic structure, stasis appears in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the figures are frozen in time: “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave”; In modern poetry, Plath’s “Mirror” embodies stasis: “I am silver and exact… unmisted by love or dislike”; In haiku, stasis is central: Bashō’s “Old pond” captures a still moment before the frog jumps; In Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the “Unreal City” evokes stasis amid urban decay; In Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” stasis follows trauma: “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs”.
Additional Notes
Stasis in prosody refers to a moment of rhythmic or metrical pause or suspension, often created by caesura, end-stopping, or heavy spondaic substitution. It contrasts with kinetic or flowing rhythm and can mirror thematic stillness, contemplation, or tension. In dramatic verse, stasis may signal a turning point or emotional climax. Prosodists analyze stasis to understand how poets manipulate time and attention within a line or stanza.
Also Known As
rhythmic pause metrical suspension
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