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

blockhead

Archaic Terms
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

An archaic term for a stupid or dull person, implying a mind as hard and unyielding as a block of wood; used in poetry to mock intellectual rigidity or emotional insensitivity.

Detailed Definition
“Blockhead” evokes a physical metaphor—mind as inert, wooden, and unresponsive—and was favored in satirical and comic verse to ridicule those who resisted reason, emotion, or change. Its imagery of solidity and lifelessness made it ideal for poems mocking stubborn officials, ignorant nobles, or rigid traditionalists. In Restoration and 18th-century poetry, it carried a tone of disdain, suggesting not merely stupidity but a willful refusal to think. Poets used it to contrast the living mind with the deadened soul, often placing the blockhead in scenes of chaos or moral decay to highlight their failure to comprehend or respond. The term’s blunt, monosyllabic force made it a staple of punchy couplets and epigrammatic verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Thou blockhead, wrapped in armor thick as thy witless skull; Why stand'st thou mute, thou great blockhead, when wisdom calls?; The blockhead dreams of crowns while chaos tears the state apart; O blockhead knight, thy sword is strong but reason thou dost lack; He spoke to fools and blockheads, whose hearts were stone and cold; A blockhead's rage is loud, but empty as the wind.
Additional Notes
“Blockhead” evokes a physical metaphor of mental rigidity, likening the mind to an inert, wooden block, and was favored in Renaissance and Restoration satire to ridicule intellectual stagnation; unlike “fool,” which sometimes carried wisdom, “blockhead” implied a complete absence of insight, often used to mock officials, soldiers, or nobles who acted by tradition rather than reason; its compound structure—“block” + “head”—gave poets a tactile, almost grotesque image for verse, ideal for describing characters who were emotionally numb or morally inert; it frequently appeared in dramatic monologues where the speaker’s contempt was as blunt as the term itself; students should recognize its synergy with terms like “clodpate” and “numbskull,” all emphasizing physicality to convey intellectual deficiency, making it a powerful tool in poems that sought to expose the absurdity of pride without perception.
Also Known As
block lump log dummy oaf noddypate numbskull clotpole
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