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.

I want a simpler life, without the hassle of being online. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the life I want.

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.

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

Bite the hand that feeds you

Idiomatic Phrase
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

To harm or show ingratitude toward someone who has been a benefactor; to act against one's own interests by attacking one's protector.

Detailed Definition
This ancient proverb, traceable to Edmund Burke, dramatizes ingratitude and self-destructive rebellion. In poetry, it explores the complex psychology of dependence—the resentment that grows within relationships of patronage, parental care, or political loyalty. Poets invoke it to interrogate power dynamics, particularly where gratitude becomes obligation and beneficence a form of control. It appears in poems of familial tension, colonial critique, and artistic independence, where the speaker must choose between comfort and authentic self-expression. The image of biting—raw, animal, embodied—charges the phrase with visceral energy, making it especially effective in poems where the violence of rebellion is felt as both necessary and costly.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about artistic patronage might explore the speaker's resentment at being expected to praise work they despise — the fear of biting the hand that feeds you in tension with the cost of perpetual dishonesty; Blake's prophetic poems bite the hand of institutional religion — the church that funded art also suppressed the vision that art, at its most honest, was compelled to express; In a postcolonial poem, to bite the hand that feeds you is reframed: the colonized nation's assertion of independence, called ingratitude by the colonizer, is recognized by the poem as a necessary and justified act; A dramatic monologue spoken by a grown child confronting a difficult parent might turn on the idiom — the whole poem a negotiation between gratitude for care received and honest reckoning with the damage done; The phrase suits poems about the academic poet whose institutional affiliation requires certain silences, and whose best work would violate those silences — biting the hand that feeds them being both the danger and the only path to integrity; In a political poem about whistleblowers, biting the hand that feeds you becomes an act of conscience — the one who tells the truth about the institution that employs them, knowing exactly what the bite will cost
Additional Notes
This idiom carries a moral warning about ingratitude and self-sabotage. In poetry, it can describe betrayal of a parent, patron, lover, homeland, or sustaining tradition. The hand image allows vivid bodily symbolism: the giver’s hand becomes wounded by the recipient. It is related to dependence, resentment, appetite, debt, and the shame of turning against one’s source of nourishment.
Also Known As
Turn against a benefactor Betray one’s supporter Bite the hand that feeds
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