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

animal allegory

Device
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 symbolic narrative using animals to represent moral or human traits.

Detailed Definition
Animal allegory employs animals as symbols representing human characteristics, moral principles, or political positions within a narrative framework. This tradition, prominent in fables, beast epics, and political satire, allows poets to explore human behavior obliquely through animal protagonists. Animal allegory can provide critical distance, enable social commentary that might be dangerous if direct, or illustrate moral lessons through the clarity of animal representation, making abstract principles concrete.
Example
Example in poetry:
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a prose animal allegory, but poetic examples include Edmund Spenser’s “The Shepheardes Calender,” where animals represent court factions; In “The Tyger,” Blake’s tiger symbolizes revolutionary energy versus the lamb’s innocence; Aesop’s fables adapted into verse by John Gay use animals to critique human folly; Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song” reimagines mythic creatures as allegories for gendered traps; Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” uses marine life to allegorize resilience; Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” employs the eagle as a spiritual allegory for transcendence.
Additional Notes
animal allegory is a narrative poetic form where the characters are animals, but their actions and situations are meant to represent human behavior, moral lessons, or political events (fables are a common type).
Also Known As
Beast allegory Animal parable Fable motif poetry Bestiary Creature comparison
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