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

Briar

Flora
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 thorny shrub, especially wild rose or bramble, with arching stems that tangle and catch.

Detailed Definition
Briar represents obstacles, wild nature, and protection in poetry. The briar patch is a place of danger and entanglement, often surrounding something precious. Sleeping Beauty's castle surrounded by briars exemplifies this symbolism. In pastoral poetry, briars represent untamed landscape resisting cultivation. The contrast between thorns and the roses or berries they protect allows poets to explore themes of difficulty guarding beauty, the cost of desire, or the defensive mechanisms of the vulnerable.
Example
Example in poetry:
Briar's thorny stems represent obstacles, danger, and the protective barriers around beauty (as in Sleeping Beauty); Wild briar roses combine delicate flowers with fierce thorns, symbolizing love's dual nature of pleasure and pain; In pastoral poetry, briar patches indicate wild, untamed nature versus cultivated gardens; The expression "briar patch" (from Brer Rabbit) adds folkloric resonance to poems about home and belonging; Blackberry or raspberry briars represent both the reward of fruit and the scratches required to obtain it; Winter briars, bare and thorny, provide stark imagery for desolation and hardship in seasonal poetry
Additional Notes
Briar often signifies entanglement, hardship, or passionate love complicated by thorns. As wild rose or bramble, it appears in fairy tales and Romantic verse as both obstacle and shelter. Its tangled growth lends itself to metaphors of emotional complexity.
Also Known As
Sweet Briar Eglantine bramble brimble
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