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

Syllepsis

Rhetorical Devices
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

Syllepsis is a figure in which one word, often a verb or adjective, governs two or more words in different grammatical or semantic senses. It creates compression, surprise, or wit through the word’s doubled function.

Detailed Definition
Syllepsis joins unlike meanings under a single governing word, as when a speaker “lost her keys and her patience.” The verb applies literally to one object and figuratively to another, making the connection feel sharp or playful. Poets use syllepsis to condense complex feeling into a brief phrase, to reveal unexpected links between physical and emotional experience, or to produce irony. Its grammatical economy can give a line momentum while its semantic shift invites readers to pause over the contrast.
Example
Example in poetry:
“She opened her door and her heart to the rain” yokes literal and figurative meanings of opened; “He lost his coat and his patience in the storm” applies lost differently to each object; “The candle burned the wick and my resolve” joins physical and emotional burning; “She carried a lantern and a loneliness through the woods” makes carried work literally and figuratively
Additional Notes
Syllepsis creates a compressed, sometimes surprising link by making one governing word apply differently to multiple objects. For example, a speaker may “lose her keys and her patience,” with “lose” operating in literal and figurative senses. The resulting mismatch can be witty, economical, or poignant. Syllepsis is often treated as a type of zeugma, though some critics use the terms interchangeably.
Other Meanings of “Syllepsis”
Also Known As
Semantic Yoking Grammatical Discord Double-Duty Construction Shifted Agreement
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