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

aurea prima sata est aetas

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

The first age was a golden age; Ovid's description of humanity's original state of innocence and abundance.

Detailed Definition
Aurea prima sata est aetas, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, describes the Golden Age when humans lived in harmony without law, labor, or conflict. In poetry, this phrase evokes prelapsarian innocence, pastoral ideals, and nostalgia for lost origins. Poets invoke it when imagining humanity before corruption, when contrasting present degeneration with original perfection. The concept structures myths of fall and redemption, providing a template for understanding historical decline. It appears in pastoral verse, elegies for lost worlds, and poems critiquing modernity, where speakers measure contemporary reality against an idealized past, using the Golden Age as both historical fantasy and moral standard against which present failure is measured.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ovid's Metamorphoses opens with "aurea prima sata est aetas," describing humanity's original innocence; Pastoral poetry invokes "aurea prima sata est aetas" when contrasting golden past with corrupted present; A contemporary poet might write "We dream of aurea prima sata est aetas, the golden age before the fall"; Political verse uses the phrase when critiquing modernity: "From aurea prima sata est aetas we have descended"; Poems about nostalgia employ "aurea prima sata est aetas" to name idealized origins; An elegy for lost innocence might invoke "aurea prima sata est aetas, when all was harmony"
Additional Notes
Ovid's Metamorphoses opens with this description of the Golden Age, when humans lived in primitive innocence without law, labor, or private property. The concept structures myths of fall from original perfection into history's corruption. Poets invoke aurea prima sata est aetas when imagining lost innocence, when measuring present failure against idealized origins, or when constructing pastoral as alternative to contemporary degradation. Related to Eden narrative, Rousseau's state of nature, and nostalgia for pre-civilized existence. The concept is both powerful myth and ideological tool: by locating perfection in the past, it can discourage efforts to build better futures. Useful for understanding pastoral's politics, the uses and abuses of golden age thinking, and how primitivism functions in poetry. The phrase also connects to environmental poetry mourning lost natural abundance.
Also Known As
the golden age was first created golden age first was born
Skip to main content