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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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.

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

ardente veritate

Latin Phrases
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

With burning truth; speaking or writing with passionate, fiery conviction.

Detailed Definition
Ardente veritate evokes the fervent, incandescent quality of truth when expressed with full emotional and intellectual commitment. In poetry, it describes verse that does not merely state but burns, transforming the reader through the intensity of its sincerity. It is associated with prophetic poetry, confessional verse, and the lyric tradition of the vates, the poet as truth-teller and seer. The image of fire as a metaphor for truth recurs throughout Western poetic tradition.
Example
Example in poetry:
The prophetic books of William Blake burn with ardente veritate — the truth he speaks about industrial exploitation, spiritual slavery, and imaginative freedom is expressed with volcanic intensity; Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" has the quality of ardente veritate — the poet's convictions about democracy, the body, and the soul expressed with an incandescent fervency that scorches away conventional reserve; A student might be asked to write an ardente veritate poem — a poem on a subject about which they feel burning conviction, allowing the heat of belief to determine the form; Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" is a poem of ardente veritate — the burning truth of feminist self-discovery expressed through an image of descent into dangerous, essential waters; The Hebrew prophetic tradition, which shaped so much Western poetry, is the great tradition of ardente veritate — the truth that burns in the bones of the speaker and cannot be contained
Additional Notes
Ardente veritate should be distinguished from veritas (truth in the abstract) and from the related concept of parrhesia (frank, fearless speech). While parrhesia emphasizes the courage of speaking truth to power regardless of personal risk, ardente veritate emphasizes the passionate, burning quality of the truth itself — its heat, its intensity, its capacity to transform the speaker and the listener. The image of truth as fire runs throughout the Western tradition from Heraclitus's logos as fire, through the Pentecostal fire of Acts, to Blake's tiger burning bright. Students should consider how the formal qualities of a poem — its rhythm, its imagery, its syntax — can carry or fail to carry ardente veritate: a truth stated coldly, however accurate, lacks the transformative force of truth stated with fire.
Also Known As
with burning truth burning truth truth on fire
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