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

Cithaeron

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

Mountain range between Boeotia and Attica, sacred to Dionysus and site of violent mythic events including Actaeon's dismemberment and Pentheus's death at his mother's hands.

Detailed Definition
Cithaeron is a liminal space where divine punishment unfolds—home to Dionysian rites and tragic revelations. It symbolizes wild nature and divine retribution. Poets invoke Cithaeron to explore themes of transgression, ecstasy, and the violent consequences of denying the gods, especially in tragic and choral poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
Cithaeron, mountain sacred to Dionysus and site of Pentheus’ death, appears in Euripides’ Bacchae; Poets invoke Cithaeron for wild, ecstatic, or tragic imagery; In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, it’s where Oedipus was abandoned—ideal for fate motifs; “Cithaeron’s pines” symbolize hidden suffering or divine madness; The mountain embodies nature’s dual nurturing and destructive power.
Additional Notes
Mount Cithaeron is a liminal space of divine punishment and ecstatic worship: Actaeon is torn apart here for seeing Artemis; Pentheus is dismembered by Maenads for opposing Dionysus. It symbolizes the dangerous proximity of civilization and wilderness. Euripides’ Bacchae centers on Cithaeron, making it essential for tragedy studies and analyses of gender, ritual, and transgression.
Also Known As
Kithairon
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