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

bulbul

Birds
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 bulbul is a small, melodious songbird, often associated in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and other literary traditions with roses, gardens, love, longing, and lyrical song.

Detailed Definition
Bulbuls are Birds of the family Pycnonotidae, found chiefly in Africa and Asia and known for their varied, musical calls. In poetry, especially poetry influenced by Persian and South Asian traditions, the bulbul is often portrayed as the rose’s devoted singer or lover, making it a symbol of beauty, desire, and yearning. English poets may use the word to evoke an idealized Eastern garden or a rich, perfumed, dreamlike landscape rather than to identify a bird scientifically.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Sharp’s “The White Peacock,” the speaker imagines a fragrant, exotic garden: “As though from the gardens Of Gulistan, Where the bulbul singeth Through a mist of roses A breath were borne” Here, the bulbul is used in its literary sense as the singing bird of a rose-filled Persian garden. Its song, carried “through a mist of roses,” helps create the poem’s lush atmosphere of scent, color, heat, and dreamlike beauty. “Singeth” is an archaic form of “sings.”
Additional Notes
The word bulbul comes into English through Persian and related languages; it is ultimately associated with the Arabic word bulbul, meaning a nightingale-like singing bird. In Persianate poetry, the bulbul and the rose are a famous symbolic pair: the bird is often the passionate lover, while the rose is beautiful, distant, or sometimes cruelly indifferent. A bulbul is not always the same bird as a nightingale in scientific classification. However, English translations and literary adaptations sometimes treat “bulbul” as a nightingale-like bird because of its poetic association with beautiful singing. Related poetic symbols include the rose, nightingale, garden, and Gulistan, a Persian word meaning “rose garden.”
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