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

Belle Époque Decadence

Historical And Literary Periods
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 late 19th-century aesthetic and philosophical movement within the Belle Époque emphasizing art's refinement, beauty's corruption, and the rejection of Victorian morality. Associated with figures like Oscar Wilde and the journal The Yellow Book.

Detailed Definition
Belle Époque Decadence shaped poetry through the cultivation of artificial beauty, erotic transgression, and the deliberate cultivation of excess and decay. Poets embraced exotic imagery, sexual ambiguity, and refined linguistic experimentation. This movement appears in poetry through ornate language celebrating artifice and decay, exploration of forbidden desire, sophisticated formal innovation, references to perfume and jewels, and rejection of moral earnestness, establishing the aestheticist tradition's lasting influence on poetry's capacity to explore transgression and beauty.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem from the perspective of a jaded aristocrat finding pleasure in perverse or artificial experiences, reflecting the morbid refinement of Belle Époque Decadence; The use of synesthesia and highly artificial, sickly sweet imagery to describe moral and physical decay; A work that rejects natural beauty and moral convention, celebrating the strange, the artificial, and the mauvais goût (bad taste); A poem focused intensely on a single, exotic, and overly decorated object, suggesting spiritual emptiness beneath the surface.
Additional Notes
Belle Époque Decadence focused on aesthetic excess, sensuality, and spiritual ennui. Writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde embodied its fascination with artifice and moral rebellion. Poetic language during this phase became lush, symbolic, and introspective, often rejecting bourgeois morality for beauty’s sake.
Also Known As
Decadent Movement Decadence Art Nouveau Period
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