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 B

Being

Philosophy
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

Being denotes existence itself—the fundamental state or quality of what is, as opposed to non-being or mere appearance.

Detailed Definition
"Being" is central to metaphysical poetry and ontology. Poets explore what it means to exist, often contrasting fleeting life with eternal presence. The term appears in meditative or existential verse that probes identity, presence, and the ground of reality beyond superficial appearances.
Example
Example in poetry:
Martin Heidegger’s influence appears in Rainer Maria Rilke’s "Sonnets to Orpheus," where existence is portrayed as open, receptive, and grounded in presence; Wallace Stevens’s "The Plain Sense of Things" meditates on being after the "souvenirs of meaning" fade; W.S. Merwin’s later poems, like "Yesterday," dwell in silence and stillness, evoking pure presence; Mary Oliver’s "When Death Comes" confronts mortality not as abstraction but as immediate, embodied reality; Giorgio Agamben notes that poetry returns language to its condition of simple being, which poets like Robert Creeley enact through minimalism.
Additional Notes
Being (from Greek ousia, Latin esse) is the foundational concern of ontology; Heidegger distinguishes it from beings (Seiendes)—Being is the “clearing” in which entities appear; poets like Rilke, Stevens, and Merwin explore Being through stillness, silence, and attention to presence; for students, poems that dwell on “what is” (rather than narrative or argument) often enact phenomenological or existential meditations on existence itself.
Also Known As
Existence Presence Ontological Presence Sat
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