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 A

Abstract dirge

Genre
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 mournful poem that expresses grief in non-representational or conceptual terms

Detailed Definition
An abstract dirge is a mournful poetic composition that eschews literal depictions of death or loss in favor of evoking grief through symbolic language, fragmented imagery, and non-representational structures; rather than narrating a specific funeral or lamenting an individual, it conveys the emotional essence of mourning through abstraction, often employing dissonant sounds, irregular rhythms, and elusive metaphors to mirror the ineffable nature of sorrow.
Example
Example in poetry:
A dirge that mourns abstract concepts like “the death of silence” in Jorie Graham’s work; A lament for “vanished time” without naming a person, as in Louise Glück’s “October”; A poem mourning “the loss of wonder” using minimal imagery and no specific subject; An elegy for “forgotten justice” that avoids concrete references, focusing on emotional residue
Additional Notes
An abstract dirge is a mournful poem that avoids literal depictions of death, instead using symbolic or non-representational language to evoke grief; often overlaps with modernist or experimental elegy forms.
Also Known As
Nonfigurative lament Symbolic mourning Ethereal elegy Metaphysical dirge Abstract elegy idea-based lament thought-focused elegy
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