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 C

Caudle cup

Ceramics
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 caudle cup is for serving spiced gruel or drink to the ill or new mothers.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, caudle cups represent care and convalescence. Poets explore nurturing and ritual.
Example
Example in poetry:
The caudle cup — a two-handled vessel for warm spiced gruel given to the sick or newly delivered — appears in seventeenth-century domestic poetry as an emblem of nurture and convalescence; A poem about childbirth in the early modern period might describe the caudle cup passing from hand to hand in the lying-in chamber, warm with cinnamon and ale; The cup's two handles — designed so the invalid could grip it without spilling — give poets an image of supported weakness: "she held the caudle cup in both hands as one holds a difficult truth"; Herrick's poems of domestic ceremony might naturally include a caudle cup, its contents as carefully compounded as his own verse; In a poem about nursing, the caudle cup stands for the specific, bodily care that poetry tends to overlook in favour of grand emotion; A verse elegy might describe the unused caudle cup left on the shelf after the patient does not recover — the nurture prepared too late, or not enough.
Additional Notes
The caudle cup, typically a two-handled covered cup in silver or ceramic, was designed for serving caudle — a warm, spiced, sweetened gruel or wine mixture given to the sick, elderly, and to women who had recently given birth. The form flourished in the seventeenth century and is closely tied to domestic rituals of care and recuperation. In ceramic collections, caudle cups in delftware or early English porcelain are particularly prized. As a poetic image, the caudle cup speaks to themes of nourishment, vulnerability, and the intimate domestic economies of the pre-modern household.
Also Known As
Porringer
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