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.

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

bella gerant alii

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

Let others wage war; a declaration preferring love, poetry, or peace to military conflict.

Detailed Definition
Bella gerant alii is drawn from Ovid, who continues: tu felix Austria nube (let happy Austria marry instead). In poetry, it expresses an Ovidian preference for love and art over martial glory. It speaks to the tradition of anti-heroic verse, challenging the supremacy of epic values and asserting that the private, the erotic, and the creative are equally valid subjects for poetry. It is a phrase of ironic self-assertion, the poet claiming the right to a different kind of heroism.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ovid declares bella gerant alii in the Amores — let others glorify war; his subject is love, and he refuses the martial values of epic in favor of erotic verse; The Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century practiced a sophisticated version of bella gerant alii — writing poems of love and pleasure while war raged outside, making lyric withdrawal itself a moral and aesthetic statement; A contemporary poet who refuses to write war poetry, insisting instead on domestic lyric, is making a bella gerant alii argument — the private and the beautiful as a form of resistance; Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" has a bella gerant alii dimension — the urgency of love contrasted implicitly with the wars and destructions that make time so precious; A student might debate whether bella gerant alii represents genuine moral courage or irresponsible aesthetic withdrawal, using poems from both traditions as evidence
Additional Notes
Bella gerant alii is the opening of a couplet from Ovid's Heroides (IX): Bella gerant alii; Protesilaus amet (let others wage war; let Protesilaus make love). It belongs to the tradition of the recusatio — the formal poetic refusal of a grander or more prestigious subject in favor of a more intimate one — and is related to the genre of the anti-epic. Students should note that the recusatio is a sophisticated rhetorical move: by explicitly declining to write about war, the poet implicitly claims a different but equally valid form of heroism. The phrase should be read alongside the Roman elegists — Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid — who all define their poetic program partly in opposition to the martial values of epic. Related terms include recusatio, militia amoris (the warfare of love, which treats erotic pursuit as a military campaign), and the elegiac couplet as the formal vehicle of the anti-epic.
Also Known As
let others wage war others may wage war bella gerant alii tu felix Austria nube
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