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

Structuralism

Philosophy
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

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that analyzes cultural products as systems of signs with underlying structures. It seeks to uncover the deep rules governing phenomena.

Detailed Definition
From Saussure to Levi-Strauss, structuralism emphasizes relations. In poetry, it informs a focus on form, genre, and linguistic systems. A structuralist reading might analyze a poem's underlying patterns. Poets themselves can use structuralist ideas to be highly self-conscious about form. This approach reveals that meaning is generated by structure, making poetry a system of differences where each element's value depends on its relation to others.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem that strictly follows a traditional form, like a sestina or a villanelle, is a structuralist work; The analysis of a poem in terms of its grammar and syntax is a structuralist approach; The belief that a poem's meaning is generated by its underlying structure is a structuralist tenet; A poet who consciously plays with the rules of a form, like a sonnet, is engaging with structuralism.
Additional Notes
Structuralism is an intellectual movement that emerged in the mid-20th century, seeking to analyze cultural products—language, literature, myths, kinship systems—as systems of signs with underlying, often unconscious, structures. It was heavily influenced by Saussure's linguistics, which emphasized that meaning is generated through relations of difference within a system. For structuralists, the task is to uncover these deep structures, which are universal and govern human behavior. In poetry, structuralism informs a focus on form, genre, and linguistic systems. A structuralist reading of a poem would analyze its underlying patterns, such as its grammar, its use of binary oppositions, and its adherence to or subversion of poetic conventions.
Also Known As
Structural linguistics (as method) Formalism (related) Semiotic analysis
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