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

Bellarmine

Ceramics
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 Bellarmine is a German stoneware jug with a bearded face mask, used historically for storage and sometimes in rituals.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Bellarmine jugs carry folkloric and apotropaic associations from the Reformation era. Poets employ them to evoke mystery, protection, and historical superstition within domestic or narrative contexts. The bearded visage adds character and symbolic weight, supporting themes of guardianship, history, and the uncanny in ordinary objects. Bellarmine ceramics provide rich allusion for verse exploring folklore, identity, and the stories vessels hold.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Bellarmine jug, with its bearded grotesque face, appears in historical poetry as a vessel of superstition — witch bottles filled with hair and pins were often Bellarmines buried beneath thresholds; John Masefield's seafaring imagery could encompass a Bellarmine hauled up in a fisherman's net, its stoneware face grinning from the silt; A poet evoking Jacobean England might write "they stopped the Bellarmine with wax and malice, and laid it under the hearthstone"; The jug's name — mocking Cardinal Bellarmine's supposed bloated features — offers poets a ready irony: authority caricatured in clay; In a poem about folk magic, the Bellarmine becomes a vessel of cursing and counter-cursing, its sealed belly holding harm; Ted Hughes's interest in myth and buried things makes the Bellarmine a natural image — unearthed, intact, its contents still potent after centuries.
Additional Notes
The Bellarmine jug — also called a Bartmannkrug or greybeard — takes its name from Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, a Counter-Reformation figure widely mocked in Protestant Germany and the Low Countries. Produced from the sixteenth century onward in the Rhineland, particularly at Cologne and Frechen, these salt-glazed stoneware jugs bear a moulded bearded mask on the neck and a globular body. They were widely used for storing liquids but also figure prominently in the history of folk magic: excavations of English domestic sites have revealed Bellarmine bottles sealed with nail clippings, hair, and bent pins, buried under thresholds as witch bottles to ward off evil. In poetry and fiction, the Bellarmine can evoke both the mundane world of early modern trade and the darker undercurrents of superstition and ritual.
Also Known As
Bartmann jug Bearded man jug Saint Robert Bellarmine
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