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

ceol

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

The Irish word for music, inseparable from poetry in the Gaelic tradition, where verse was composed to be sung or chanted and the boundary between music and poetry was deliberately blurred.

Detailed Definition
Ceol permeates Irish poetic culture because in the Gaelic tradition, poetry and music were never fully separate arts. The metres of Irish syllabic verse were tied to musical performance, and the amhrán or song-poem tradition made melody and lyric inseparable. When poets invoke ceol, they evoke not merely sound but the whole sensory and social world of Irish musical culture — the harp, the human voice, the communal gathering. Revival poets used ceol as a touchstone for the emotional richness they sought to recover from Gaelic tradition, and it appears frequently as both subject and aspiration in verse that mourns the silencing of a culture.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ceol fills the hall as the harper begins the evening's entertainment; The ceol of the uilleann pipes evokes both joy and melancholy; Poets describe ceol as having power to heal wounded spirits; Without ceol, the feast lacks its essential spiritual dimension; The ceol connects present listeners to generations of musical ancestors; Modern compositions blend traditional ceol with contemporary instruments and themes.
Additional Notes
Ceol (music) is inseparable from poetry in the Irish tradition, where verse was originally composed to be sung or chanted. In poetry, ceol represents harmony, emotional expression, and cultural continuity. The loss of ceol is often lamented as a sign of cultural decay. Poets describe the power of ceol to heal, enchant, or provoke action. Understanding the musical context of Irish poetry is essential for appreciating its rhythmic structures and the importance of sound patterns beyond mere semantic meaning.
Also Known As
music melody tune harmony
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