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 T

Two-line unit

Form
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 verse structure consisting of two lines, whether rhymed or unrhymed

Detailed Definition
A two-line unit is the fundamental structural building block consisting of a pair of verse lines that function together as a coherent entity within a poem's architecture. This basic form, known variously as a couplet, distich, or verse pair depending on context and tradition, represents one of poetry's most versatile and widespread structures. Two-line units can be end-stopped or enjambed, rhymed or unrhymed, parallel or progressive, serving diverse purposes from epigrammatic compression to extended narrative while demonstrating the fundamental human tendency to perceive and create meaning through paired structures.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s sonnet couplets: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”; Emily Dickinson’s slant-rhyme pairs: “Hope is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul –”; Alexander Pope’s heroic couplets: “To err is human; to forgive, divine”; Langston Hughes’ blues pairs: “Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die”; A.E. Housman’s lyrical pairs: “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough”; Contemporary poet Ada Limón: “I am not trying to be beautiful. / I am trying to be honest.”
Additional Notes
A Two-line unit is the simplest stanzaic form (a distich), foundational to couplets, antiphons, and epigrams—can be rhymed, unrhymed, closed, or enjambed.
Also Known As
Distich Couplet Two-line stanza Rhyming pair standalone two-line unit
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