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 libres

French
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

Free verse: poetry liberated from regular meter, fixed rhyme scheme, and strict strophic structure. The dominant mode of modern and contemporary French poetry since the Symbolist revolution.

Detailed Definition
Vers libres represents the most consequential formal innovation in the history of French poetry since the Renaissance. Liberating poetry from the constraints of regular meter and obligatory rhyme, it was pioneered by Gustave Kahn and other Symbolist poets in the 1880s as an expression of individual rhythm over inherited convention. Verlaine's call for nuance over rhetoric prepared the ground, but Kahn, Vielé-Griffin, and later Apollinaire made vers libres the language of modernity. Rather than formal chaos, vers libres substitutes personal rhythm, image sequences, and breath units for the impersonal regularity of classical prosody, redefining what a poem can be.
Example
Example in poetry:
Vers libres abandon strict metre and regular rhyme in favour of freer rhythm; Guillaume Apollinaire helped popularise experimental forms akin to vers libres; A student writes a poem with irregular line lengths and no fixed rhyme as vers libres; Modern French poetry often uses vers libres for conversational immediacy
Additional Notes
Virelai is one of the principal medieval French formes fixes, strongly associated with lyric song, refrain structure, and musical performance. Students should study it alongside the rondeau and ballade to understand medieval formal systems comparatively. Because repetition and return are central, thematic interpretation should consider how refrains evolve in meaning. The virelai demonstrates the intimate historical relationship between poetic form, melody, and public or courtly performance culture.
Also Known As
Free verse Vers libéré
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