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

Circe

Mythology
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 powerful enchantress in the Odyssey who transforms Odysseus’s men into swine, symbolizing temptation and loss of reason.

Detailed Definition
Circe is a powerful sorceress who lived on the island of Aeaea and transformed Odysseus’s crew into pigs before becoming his lover and advisor. She embodies the duality of feminine power—seductive yet dangerous, nurturing yet controlling. Poets invoke Circe to explore themes of transformation, temptation, and the ambiguity of magic.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Homer’s "Odyssey," Circe transforms men into swine, symbolizing the dangers of unchecked desire; In Ovid’s "Metamorphoses," Circe’s magic reflects the fluidity of identity; In James Joyce’s "Ulysses" (poetic prose), Circe appears in a hallucinatory brothel episode; In H.D.’s “Circe,” the sorceress reclaims power as a wise woman; In Louise Glück’s “Circe’s Power,” the goddess asserts agency over transformation; In modern feminist poetry, Circe often represents female knowledge feared as witchcraft.
Additional Notes
Circe, the enchantress who turns Odysseus’s men into swine, represents transformative magic, female power, and the dangers of indulgence; poets use her to explore themes of temptation, metamorphosis, and the ambiguity of hospitality—her island (Aeaea) becomes a space of delay and self-discovery, and she often symbolizes the poet’s own power to reshape reality through language.
Also Known As
Enchantress of Aeaea Mistress of Transformation Sorceress of Swine
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