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

Bleak

Mood
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

Conveying a mood of stark desolation, emptiness, and emotional coldness, often evoked through barren imagery and unrelenting tone.

Detailed Definition
Bleak mood in poetry evokes emotional or physical barrenness through stark landscapes, cold diction, and minimal rhythm; it appears in post-apocalyptic verse, winter elegies, or existential laments—like Eliot or Larkin—where the world offers no comfort, reflecting the poet’s vision of isolation, futility, or the chilling absence of meaning in modern existence.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot paints a bleak postwar landscape where “Falls the Shadow” and hope is extinguished; Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” describes a “frost-beleaguered” world, yet a bird sings—highlighting the surrounding bleakness; In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold laments a “darkling plain” swept by “ignorant armies,” evoking bleak despair; Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” portrays a hospital room where even color feels oppressive, creating a bleak mood of emotional numbness; W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” envisions a bleak future where “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed”; In “The Waste Land,” Eliot’s barren landscapes and fragmented voices construct a profoundly bleak vision of modernity.
Additional Notes
Bleak mood evokes stark hopelessness, barrenness, or desolation; often rendered through wintry landscapes, sparse language, or absence of color—e.g., Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic verse; overlaps with dismal, dreary, and somber moods; useful for existential or post-apocalyptic themes; differs from melancholic in its harsher, less introspective quality.
Also Known As
Gloomy Dismal Desolate Hopeless Austere Dreary Dreich Chankly comfortless
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