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

Anxiety

Philosophy
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

Anxiety is a fundamental feeling of unease or dread often linked to awareness of freedom and uncertainty. It is central to existential thought.

Detailed Definition
In existential philosophy, anxiety reveals the individual’s confrontation with freedom, choice, and mortality. In poetry, it manifests as tension, fragmentation, or questioning, often expressed through disjointed imagery or shifting rhythms. Poets use anxiety to explore inner conflict and the instability of meaning, making it a key theme in modern and postmodern verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Kierkegaard's concept of existential anxiety — Angst as the "dizziness of freedom" — pervades confessional poetry, especially Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" (prose) and her poems like "Lady Lazarus," which dramatize the terror of selfhood without stable ground; Heidegger's analysis of anxiety as the mood in which Dasein confronts its own groundlessness and mortality is enacted in late Rilke, where beauty is inseparable from the terrifying (the angel who would destroy the human if it truly appeared); Auden's "The Age of Anxiety" (1947) takes its title directly from existentialist philosophy and maps the spiritual anxiety of modernity through a long dramatic eclogue of characters seeking meaning in a disenchanted world; A poet writing about climate change might frame ecological grief as philosophical anxiety in the Kierkegaardian sense — the vertigo of freedom and responsibility before an open and threatening future; Gerard Manley Hopkins's "terrible sonnets" (the "Dark Night" sequence) are sustained meditations on spiritual anxiety — the dread of God's absence and the self's contingency — making theology and psychology inseparable; Modernist fragmentation in Eliot and Pound can be read as a formal enactment of cultural anxiety — the anxiety of a civilization whose inherited structures have broken down and whose freedom is therefore vertiginous
Additional Notes
In Kierkegaard's "The Concept of Anxiety," anxiety (Angest) is not a pathological condition but the existential response to freedom — the dizziness one feels when confronted with the openness of genuine possibility. It is distinct from fear (which has a specific object) in being directed toward nothing in particular, or toward the nothingness that is freedom itself. Heidegger develops this in "Being and Time": anxiety individuates Dasein, pulling it out of the comfort of "das Man" (the they-self) and confronting it with its own groundlessness and mortality. Sartre's analysis of anxiety as the experience of radical freedom ("we are condemned to be free") extends Kierkegaard's insight into a full existentialist ethics. For poets, anxiety in this philosophical sense is not merely a mood but a cognitive and ontological revelation. Related terms: dread, freedom, authenticity, Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness), the nothing, existentialism.
Other Meanings of “Anxiety”
Also Known As
Cura Nervousness Restlessness Stress Worry
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