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 A

acta est fabula

Latin Phrases
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

The play is over; traditionally spoken at the end of a Roman theatrical performance.

Detailed Definition
Acta est fabula marks the close of a dramatic performance and was reportedly uttered by Augustus Caesar on his deathbed, lending the phrase a deeply elegiac character. In poetry, it signals finality, closure, and the theatrical nature of life. Poets invoke it in meditations on mortality, the end of an era, or the conclusion of a creative work, asking the reader to reflect on what has been enacted and what is now irreversibly past.
Example
Example in poetry:
Suetonius reports that Augustus Caesar's last words were a version of acta est fabula — asking if he had played his part well — and this theatrical framing of a life's end has fascinated poets ever since; Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech in As You Like It is an extended meditation on acta est fabula, each age of man a scene in a play that ends in oblivion; Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies carry the weight of acta est fabula — a sense that the human drama is drawing to a close and must be affirmed before the curtain falls; A poet writing an elegy might close with acta est fabula, acknowledging that the deceased has completed their performance with grace; W.B. Yeats's late poems, particularly "The Circus Animals' Desertion," have the quality of acta est fabula — a final accounting of the themes and images that constituted a life's work
Additional Notes
Acta est fabula was the traditional formula spoken at the end of Roman theatrical performances, and its adoption by Augustus on his deathbed — asking whether he had played his part well — transformed it from a theatrical convention into one of the most resonant phrases for the relationship between life and performance. The phrase is central to the theatrum mundi tradition, the idea that the world is a stage and human life a performance, which runs from Plato through Shakespeare's Jacques to Calderón de la Barca. Students should consider how the phrase complicates the elegiac tradition: if life is a performance, then death is not a tragedy but a completion, and the quality of the death reflects the quality of the acting. Related concepts include persona (the mask worn in performance), the theatrum mundi topos, and the ars moriendi tradition of dying well.
Also Known As
the play is over the show is over acta fabula est
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