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

Agra

Historical Location
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 city in northern India on the Yamuna River, famed for the Taj Mahal and Mughal architecture

Detailed Definition
Though not part of classical Western poetic geography, Agra appears in Romantic and Victorian poetry as a symbol of exotic splendor, imperial grandeur, and tragic love—primarily through the Taj Mahal. British poets referenced it to evoke the Orient’s beauty and mystery, often blending historical fact with imaginative Orientalism to explore themes of mortality, memory, and eternal devotion.
Example
Example in poetry:
A Mughal-era ghazal praises Agra’s moonlit gardens as mirrors of divine beauty; In a post-Partition poem, Agra’s Taj Mahal becomes a tomb not just for Mumtaz but for lost unity; A contemporary Indian poet contrasts Agra’s marble splendor with the poverty in its alleys; A colonial-era sonnet romanticizes Agra as an “Oriental dream” frozen in time; A feminist lyric reinterprets Agra as a site of both love and female erasure.
Additional Notes
Agra’s significance in poetry stems less from antiquity and more from its Mughal-era grandeur, particularly the Taj Mahal—an enduring symbol of love and loss; while not a classical site, Agra appears in post-medieval and Romantic poetry as an emblem of Oriental splendor and melancholy, useful for discussions of cross-cultural poetic imagery.
Also Known As
Agrā Akbarabad
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