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

Changeling

Supernatural
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 fairy child or substitute believed to have been left in place of a human child. The term suggests estrangement, transformation, and fear of the unfamiliar.

Detailed Definition
In folklore, a changeling is a child exchanged by fairies for a human infant, or a fairy being left behind in the human child’s place. Poets use the figure to explore alienation within families, bodily difference, and the troubling sense of not belonging in one’s own life. A changeling may also symbolize abrupt change after illness, trauma, or loss, when a familiar person seems mysteriously altered.
Example
Example in poetry:
W. B. Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” draws on folklore in which fairies steal children, offering a useful source for changeling imagery.; A poem may present a changeling as a child who returns altered: “My son came home with river eyes and no name for bread.”; Changeling imagery can express alienation in adolescence, when a parent feels that a familiar child has become unknowable.; A speaker might suspect they are a changeling to explore displacement: “I was exchanged at birth for someone fluent in belonging.”
Additional Notes
A changeling can symbolize a child who feels alienated from family or society. It also raises questions about identity, illness, parenting, and fear of unexplained change.
Also Known As
Fairy Child Fairy Changeling
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