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 V

Vers libre

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

French term for free verse, denoting poetry with irregular meter and rhyme

Detailed Definition
Vers libre (French for "free verse") is a poetic form that rejects regular meter and rhyme in favor of rhythm derived from natural speech patterns, syntactic phrasing, and thematic emphasis. Emerging in late 19th-century France with poets like Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue, and later championed by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, vers libre uses line breaks, caesuras, and repetition to create organic musicality without metrical constraints. It is not "formless" but relies on internal structures—such as image clusters, tonal shifts, or rhetorical patterns—to achieve coherence. For students, vers libre represents a pivotal modernist break from tradition, emphasizing the poet’s freedom to shape form according to content while demanding heightened attention to the subtle rhythms of language.
Example
Example in poetry:
Vers libre: Free verse pioneers: Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass"; Modernist: T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; Contemporary: Louise Glück’s "The Wild Iris"; Vers libre avoids meter but uses cadence, as in Langston Hughes’ jazz poems
Additional Notes
French "free verse" - poetry without regular meter or rhyme. Liberated from traditional forms. Study Whitman, modern poetry for development. Contrast with formal verse structures.
Also Known As
Free verse Unmetered verse Open form Liberated poetry Forme libre
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