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

Subordinate imagery

Imagery
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

Imagery that supports or contextualizes the primary figurative focus, functioning as background or atmospheric enhancement.

Detailed Definition
Subordinate imagery consists of descriptive elements in a poem that support or contextualize a primary image without competing for focal attention, functioning like background texture or atmospheric detail that enriches the central metaphor or scene; for example, in a poem centered on a “burning house,” subordinate imagery might include “crackling eaves,” “ash-thick air,” or “distant sirens”—details that amplify mood and sensory immersion without diverting from the core symbol, demonstrating how layered imagery can create depth and realism through hierarchical arrangement rather than equal emphasis.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale’s song is subordinate imagery to the speaker’s meditation on mortality: “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”; In Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers,” the bird is subordinate imagery supporting the abstract concept of hope; In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” yellow fog functions as subordinate imagery for urban alienation: “It rubbed its back upon the window-panes”; In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” the tennis court is subordinate imagery for racial exclusion; In Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” the moon is subordinate imagery for queer longing and displacement.
Additional Notes
Subordinate imagery supports a dominant image without competing for focus; creates layered depth—use background details to enrich primary metaphor without distraction.
Also Known As
Secondary imagery Subordinate pictures Dependent description Lower-order figures
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