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

Burn

Dialect
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 small stream or brook; an essential feature of the Scottish landscape.

Detailed Definition
"Burn" is one of the most poetically resonant words in Scots, appearing in countless poems and place names. From Burns's riverside meditations to MacDiarmid's waterscapes, the burn represents nature's intimacy, the passage of time, and the heart of the Scottish countryside. Its sound echoes the gentle movement of water, and it carries connotations of childhood, memory, and natural beauty. No other word quite captures the modest, musical quality of a Scottish stream.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Burn" means a small stream or brook; Burns writes "Sweet Afton" about a burn and uses burns extensively as natural symbols; A poet might write: "The burn runs clear owre mossy stane, / its song unchanged by joy or pain." for meditative nature poetry; "She knelt beside the slender burn / and watched her face begin to turn." uses water as a mirror; "The burn that fed my childhood dreams / still sings its unrepeatable themes." evokes memory through natural continuity; "Beside the burn the primrose grows / and bends tae where the cool wind blows." creates a pastoral vignette; "The burn ran red wi' autumn's clay / the day she packed her grief away." uses natural imagery for emotional metaphor; "Follow the burn and ye'll find hame — / the water and the heart's the same." turns geography into spiritual guidance
Additional Notes
Burn is one of those Scots words that does not merely name a landscape feature but embodies a whole relationship to place. Scottish poetry is saturated with burns — they mark boundaries, provide sound (one of the most common natural sounds in pastoral verse), carry metaphorical weight (the flow of time, of feeling, of life), and ground poems in specific, nameable geography. Burns himself shares his name with this word, a biographical fact poets have not been slow to exploit. Students should notice how "burn" in Scottish poetry is rarely merely descriptive — it almost always carries emotional or symbolic freight, whether of continuity, loss, or the persistent life of a place.
Also Known As
Brook Stream Beck
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