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.

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 T

Three-short-one-long foot

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 metrical unit consisting of three unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.

Detailed Definition
The fourth paeon in classical quantitative prosody, consisting of three short syllables followed by one long syllable. Complex metrical foot in Greek and Latin poetry where syllable duration rather than stress determines rhythm. Rare in English due to stress-based rather than quantity-based meter. Understanding classical feet including three-short-one-long patterns helps analyze ancient poetry and its influences on English verse traditions. The complexity arises from coordinating multiple unstressed elements before final stressed beat, creating specific rhythmic character.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Greek metrics, the tribrach (three short syllables) followed by a long forms the three-short-one-long foot, though rare in English; In Latin poetry, the cretic foot (long-short-long) sometimes appears in sequences approximating this pattern; In experimental English verse, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” occasionally clusters three light syllables before a stressed one: “and all the world’s pleasure”; Contemporary poet Christian Bök uses artificial syllabic groupings in “Eunoia” that mimic this foot for phonetic effect; In nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock,” the rhythm “hic-ko-ry dic-ko-ry dock” loosely approximates three shorts and a long.
Additional Notes
The fourth paeon in classical prosody: three short syllables followed by one long (˘˘˘—). Complex metrical foot in quantitative verse. Rare in English due to stress-based rather than quantity-based meter. Understanding classical feet helps analyze Greek and Latin poetry and their influence on English forms.
Also Known As
fourth paeon paeon quartus tribrach-trochee complex quaternary foot Epitrite
Skip to main content