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

amhrán

Dialect
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 Irish word for a song or song-poem, representing the stress-based accentual metre that replaced the strict syllabic metres of the bardic tradition in popular Irish verse from the seventeenth century onward.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Ballad — Ballads tell memorable stories in a compact, musical form. Rooted in oral tradition but endlessly reshaped on the printed page, they use rhythm, repetition and dramatic scenes to make narratives travel.

Detailed Definition
The amhrán metre, based on stress and syllable patterns tied to musical delivery, democratised Irish verse by freeing it from the demanding requirements of dán díreach. As the bardic schools collapsed following the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests, poets increasingly composed in amhrán metres suited to communal singing. This shift produced a rich popular tradition including love songs, political laments, and drinking songs that carried Irish poetic energy through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The amhrán tradition fed directly into the song revival of the twentieth century and remains the living form closest to most Irish speakers' experience of poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
The amhrán tells the story of a young lover waiting by the shore for his beloved; Traditional amhrán structures often feature repetitive refrains that invite communal singing; This amhrán combines melancholy melody with lyrics about exile and longing; The fisherman sings an amhrán to calm the restless sea during stormy nights; In contemporary usage, the amhrán has evolved into modern folk songs that preserve historical memory; The amhrán remains a vital form for expressing collective emotion in Irish culture.
Additional Notes
The amhrán represents a shift from the strict syllabic metre of classical bardic poetry (dán díreach) to the stress-based accentual metre that aligns more closely with spoken Irish and folk song. This form became dominant after the collapse of the Gaelic aristocratic patronage system, allowing poetry to survive in oral tradition among the common people. When studying amhrán, pay attention to the interplay between text and tune, as these poems were primarily intended for singing rather than silent reading, influencing their rhythmic structure and repetitive refrains.
Also Known As
song ballad folk song
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