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

bellman

Historical Office
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 town crier or night watchman who rang a bell while announcing news or warnings

Detailed Definition
Bellmen feature in poetry as voices of communal memory or urban anxiety, their nightly calls marking time and danger. Historically, they patrolled streets after dark, alerting citizens to fires, crimes, or curfews. In verse—especially in Jacobean or Restoration poetry—they evoke atmosphere, solitude, or the fragility of civic order. Their rhythmic cries lend themselves to poetic meter, and their role as public announcers connects them to themes of mortality, rumor, and the passage of time.
Example
Example in poetry:
In John Dryden’s civic odes, the bellman’s nightly call marks time and warns of fire or curfew; Thomas Dekker’s "The Bellman of London" uses the figure to explore urban vice and vigilance; In Romantic poetry, the bellman’s echo becomes a metaphor for memory or conscience; Charles Lamb’s essays in verse recall the bellman as a vanishing voice of old London; Victorian poets like Christina Rossetti use the bellman to evoke pre-industrial rhythms; The bellman in nursery rhymes ("Oranges and Lemons") preserves communal memory through sound.
Additional Notes
Bellmen, also known as town criers or night watchmen, were vital before mass communication, using bells and vocal proclamations to share news, curfews, or emergencies; their rhythmic calls influenced poetic meter and public address forms—references in poetry (e.g., Shakespeare’s “bellman’s curse”) often signal time, warning, or communal memory, making them useful for analyzing soundscapes and civic rhythm in historical verse.
Also Known As
town crier
Skip to main content