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

Aspendus

Historical Location
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

An ancient city in Pamphylia (southern Anatolia), famed for its Roman-era theater and coinage

Detailed Definition
Aspendus was a prosperous city on the Eurymedon River, renowned for its exceptionally preserved Roman theater and distinctive coinage depicting wrestlers. In poetry, it appears as a symbol of Hellenistic-Roman cultural synthesis and the endurance of art amid political change. Its name may evoke the harmony of architecture, performance, and civic pride—frequent motifs in verse reflecting on classical ruins and lost urban splendor.
Example
Example in poetry:
Aspendus; In Pausanias’ travelogue, Aspendus boasts the best-preserved theater in Asia Minor, where the chorus once sang of Dionysus; Aspendus; A 19th-century poet writes, “Aspendus, where the marble seats still hold the echo of a thousand voices in unison”; Aspendus; In a lyrical meditation, “Aspendus—where the stage is empty, but the air still trembles with the rhythm of ancient verse”; Aspendus; A modern poem reads: “I sat in Aspendus and heard the ghosts recite Euripides—their breath still warm on the stone”; Aspendus; The poet writes, “Aspendus teaches: even empires crumble, but poetry lingers in the curve of a colonnade”; Aspendus; “Aspendus does not need words to speak—its architecture is the poem.”
Additional Notes
Aspendus, famed for its remarkably preserved Roman theater, becomes in poetry a symbol of cultural continuity and artistic legacy; its marble seats and acoustics are metaphors for enduring voice and memory, allowing poets to juxtapose the permanence of art against the ruin of empires, especially in works meditating on time and cultural decay
Also Known As
Aspendos
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