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

Chronogram

Time And Calendar
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

An inscription or phrase whose selected letters encode a date as Roman numerals. It joins language, number, and commemoration.

Detailed Definition
A chronogram is a verbal construction in which letters that also function as Roman numerals yield a particular year when counted. Found on monuments, title pages, and memorials, it turns a date into a verbal puzzle. Poets may use chronograms to make time physically present inside a line of language, linking commemoration with concealment and suggesting that history survives in marks that readers must learn to decipher.
Example
Example in poetry:
A chronogram hides a date in selected Roman-numeral letters, allowing a poem or inscription to record a year through typography; A poet could write a commemorative line whose capital letters M, D, C, L, X, V, and I add up to the year of a death; George Wither’s emblematic writing and many Renaissance inscriptions show the era’s delight in verbal puzzles and symbolic dates; In a modern poem, a chronogram might encode the year of a private loss so that attentive readers discover it gradually
Additional Notes
A chronogram is an inscription or phrase whose Roman-numeral letters conceal a date, making wording itself a memorial, dedication, or historical puzzle. Capitals such as M, D, C, L, X, V, and I are counted and added to reveal the year. It combines verbal meaning with visual and numerical design. Compare acrostic and palindrome, which also embed patterns in language. Study hint: list and total only the intended numeral letters before interpreting the phrase.
Other Meanings of “Chronogram”
Also Known As
Chronostich
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