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

Apathetic

Mood
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 mood conveying emotional detachment, indifference, or absence of passion or concern.

Detailed Definition
Apathetic mood in poetry conveys numbness or disengagement, often through flat diction, monotone rhythm, and sparse imagery; it appears in postmodern or disillusioned verse—like some of Larkin or Ashbery—where emotional withdrawal reflects societal alienation, existential fatigue, or the aftermath of trauma, challenging readers to confront the void of meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” the repeated “Shape without form, shade without colour” reflects an apathetic mood of spiritual emptiness; Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” presents a speaker numbly accepting mortality with cold detachment (“Most things may never happen: this one will”); In “The Waste Land,” the typist’s mechanical encounter (“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand”) illustrates apathetic resignation; W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” satirizes bureaucratic conformity through an apathetic citizen who “was fully insured” but never questioned his life; In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold laments a world where “neither joy, nor love, nor light” remain, evoking apathetic despair; The flat, emotionless tone in much of Samuel Beckett’s poetic prose mirrors apathetic existential fatigue.
Additional Notes
Apathetic mood denotes emotional detachment, indifference, or lack of concern; often signaled by flat diction, monotone rhythm, or sparse imagery—seen in postmodern or disillusioned verse (e.g., some of Philip Larkin); contrasts sharply with passionate or fervent tones; related to detached, listless, or resigned moods; effective for critiquing alienation or societal numbness.
Also Known As
Indifferent Unconcerned Dispassionate Unmoved Detached Listless fervourless
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