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

aonach

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

A traditional Irish fair or assembly combining commerce, sport, entertainment, and poetic performance, functioning as a key social institution where oral culture was publicly enacted.

Detailed Definition
The aonach (fair or assembly) was one of the great periodic gatherings of Irish society, held at sites of mythological or royal significance and serving simultaneously as market, athletic competition, legal forum, and artistic occasion. Poets, musicians, and storytellers performed at aonach gatherings, and the competitions held there were among the most prestigious in Gaelic culture. The most famous was the Aonach Tailteann, associated with the mythological queen Tailtiu and revived symbolically in the modern Tailteann Games. For Irish poets, the aonach represents the ideal of verse as public, communal, and socially embedded rather than privately meditative.
Example
Example in poetry:
The aonach brings together poets, musicians, and traders from across the province; At the aonach, bards compete for prestige through improvised verse competitions; The annual aonach serves as a crucial venue for preserving oral literary traditions; Memories of the aonach evoke images of colorful gatherings and spirited debates; The poet recalls the aonach as a place where art and commerce intertwined seamlessly; Decline of the aonach marked the erosion of traditional Gaelic social structures.
Additional Notes
The aonach was not merely a commercial fair but a vital cultural institution where poets, musicians, and scholars gathered to exchange news, perform, and compete. In poetry, references to the aonach evoke a sense of communal identity and social cohesion that was lost with the decline of Gaelic society. Modern poets often use the aonach as a symbol of lost cultural unity or as a setting for romantic encounters and heroic feats, drawing on its association with freedom, movement, and the temporary suspension of everyday social hierarchies.
Also Known As
fair assembly gathering market
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