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

aureole

World Religion
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 radiant halo or circle of light surrounding the head or body of a sacred figure in religious art, signifying holiness or divine presence.

Detailed Definition
An aureole is a luminous nimbus encircling the head or entire body of a saint, angel, or deity in Christian, Buddhist, and other sacred iconography, symbolizing sanctity, enlightenment, or divine glory. In literature and poetry, the aureole functions as a metaphor for spiritual illumination, moral purity, or transcendent insight. Poets employ the image to suggest inner radiance, martyrdom, or the thin boundary between mortal and divine, transforming visual theology into a language of light, grace, and exalted presence.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” the shining presence of Christ is suggested through radiant light imagery that functions like an aureole, marking divine glory amid catastrophe; In Dante’s Paradiso, the blessed souls appear encircled by living light, effectively bearing aureoles that signify their sanctity and closeness to God; A poet describing the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree might depict an aureole of dawn-light around his head to symbolise enlightenment and inner awakening; In a war elegy, a fallen nurse could be imagined with a faint aureole in the smoke-filled sky, elevating her sacrifice to the level of martyrdom; A contemporary poem about moral courage might portray an ordinary protester with an invisible aureole of streetlamp light, suggesting quiet holiness in civic action.
Additional Notes
The aureole differs from a simple halo (nimbus) in that it may surround the entire body rather than only the head, often indicating heightened sanctity, transfiguration, or divine manifestation; in Christian art it appears in depictions of Christ in Majesty or the Transfiguration, while in Buddhist and Hindu iconography similar radiant fields mark enlightenment or cosmic power. For poetry students, the aureole offers a rich visual-to-verbal symbol: it can suggest spiritual illumination, martyrdom, moral purity, or ironic “false sainthood.” Related concepts include nimbus, mandorla (an almond-shaped aureole), glory, and effulgence. When used metaphorically, it can elevate an ordinary figure or critique the human tendency to sanctify leaders, thus carrying both devotional and subversive potential in literary contexts.
Also Known As
Nimbus Halo of Glory Mandorla Crown of Light
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