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

Anxiety

Psychology
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 state of unease, worry, or fear about future events, often diffuse and objectless.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, anxiety emerges as a pervasive emotional tone, reflecting modern existential dread or personal turmoil. Poets use fragmented syntax, restless rhythms, and unsettling imagery to convey the mind's spiraling uncertainty. From Romantic introspection to Confessional verse, anxiety bridges private neurosis and collective unease, making it a powerful lens for exploring identity, mortality, and societal pressure.
Example
Example in poetry:
Anxiety in Mary Oliver's "I Worried" captures the endless circles of overthinking; In Sylvia Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree," anxiety manifests through oppressive natural imagery; Shel Silverstein's "Whatif" lists childish anxieties that keep the speaker awake at night; Louise Glück's "The Doorway" uses the metaphor of a child in a doorway to express fear of moving forward; John Ashbery's "The Problem of Anxiety" intertwines anxiety with depression and aging; Stephen Spender's "XVIII" uses cutting imagery to show how anxiety consumes thought.
Additional Notes
When writing about anxiety in poetry, note that poets often employ irregular meter, fragmented syntax, and repetition to mirror the restless, spiraling quality of anxious thought. The term is closely related to dread and apprehension but differs in that anxiety tends to be more diffuse and objectless, whereas dread often has a specific focus. In classroom discussions, encourage students to identify how formal elements like enjambment and caesura can create a sense of breathlessness or interruption that mimics anxious cognition. Anxiety frequently appears alongside depression in confessional poetry, and both terms are central to understanding the psychological depth of Modernist and contemporary verse.
Other Meanings of “Anxiety”
Also Known As
Foreboding disquiet angst nervous dread existential unease
Skip to main content