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

Systole

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

The shortening or compression of a syllable or foot, opposite of diastole

Detailed Definition
Systole contracts duration or emphasis, typically applied to naturally long syllables pronounced short to fit metrical requirements, particularly in quantitative classical verse. In classical and experimental modern poetry, systole demonstrates the poet's technical mastery of prosodic flexibility; it allows compression of material within fixed metrical schemes while maintaining semantic clarity, showing how form and meaning can coexist through sophisticated prosodic manipulation.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Greek metrics, systole shortens a long syllable to fit meter, as in dactylic substitution; In Latin poetry, systole allows “āēr” to be scanned as two short syllables; In English, systole appears when poets compress words like “heaven” to one syllable (“’ven”) in hymns; In Shakespeare’s sonnets, “even” may undergo systole to “’ven” to maintain iambic rhythm; In Milton’s “Lycidas,” “flow’rs” represents systole of “flowers” to one syllable; In Greek lyric, systole enables metrical flexibility in Aeolic verse.
Additional Notes
Systole in prosody refers to the metrical shortening of a normally long (or stressed) syllable to fit a rhythmic pattern—essentially the opposite of diastole (lengthening). Though more relevant in quantitative meters (Greek/Latin), systole can occur in English when a typically stressed syllable is demoted to fit iambic flow (e.g., "paradise" with stress on first syllable forced into unstressed position). It reflects the flexibility poets employ to maintain meter without distorting meaning.
Also Known As
metrical shortening syllabic contraction
Skip to main content