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

Surplus pentameter

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

A pentameter line containing more syllables or stresses than standard measure allows

Detailed Definition
Surplus pentameter describes a metrical line that exceeds the standard five feet of iambic pentameter by adding one or more extra syllables or feet, often for expressive emphasis, rhythmic variation, or dramatic effect; unlike hypermetrical lines that merely append an unstressed syllable, surplus pentameter may incorporate an entire additional foot or disrupt the expected pattern to convey urgency, overflow, or psychological tension—as seen in the expansive, breathless lines of Walt Whitman or in Shakespeare’s occasional use of hexameter within blank verse to signal heightened emotion or thematic climax.
Example
Example in poetry:
Surplus pentameter appears in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where lines like “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” stretch beyond ten syllables for dramatic effect; in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” the line “With many recognitions dim and sweet” subtly exceeds pentameter; Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother” uses an 11-syllable line—“You were born, you had body, you died”—to heighten emotional weight; Shakespeare occasionally inserts 11-syllable lines in blank verse to signal psychological tension or rhetorical emphasis.
Additional Notes
Surplus pentameter exceeds ten syllables while retaining iambic rhythm. Contrast with deficient pentameter. Common in dramatic verse—scan to see if extra syllables serve emotional emphasis or rhythmic variation.
Also Known As
Extended pentameter line Surplus verse Overlength stanza Added five-foot measure Hyperiambic pentameter
Skip to main content