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

Apparition

Supernatural
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 visible manifestation of a ghost or spirit. In poetry, it often signals memory, warning, or unresolved grief.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
An apparition is a spectral figure that appears to the living, sometimes briefly and without explanation. Poets use apparitions to make absence seem physically present: a dead lover at a window, a soldier crossing a field, or a childhood figure returning in dreamlike light. Its uncertain reality is especially useful in lyric poetry, where the speaker may not know whether the vision is supernatural, imagined, or produced by longing.
Example
Example in poetry:
An apparition appears at the window in a lyric to make grief visible: “My mother stood in rain, a pale apparition among the roses.”; In a war poem, an apparition of a fallen soldier can blur memory and haunting: “At dawn, his apparition crossed the emptied trench.”; Emily Dickinson’s haunted speakers often make invisible presences feel bodily, a useful model for writing an apparition that may be psychological rather than literal.; A poet can delay certainty by asking whether the figure is an apparition or a living visitor, creating suspense and ambiguity.
Additional Notes
An apparition may be literal or psychological: poets use it to make memory visible, especially when grief or guilt seems to return in bodily form. Compare phantom and shade.
Also Known As
Ghost Spirit Phantom ghaist taibhreamh taidhbhse The Wraith Wraith
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