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

colosseum

Games
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

Colosseum is the great Flavian amphitheatre in Rome, emblem of the imperial spectacles of combat and display.

Detailed Definition
Colosseum appears in poetry as the ultimate emblem of the ancient arena and the enduring ruin of spectacle. In literary tradition it represents the scale of the imperial game. Poets draw on the Colosseum to illustrate themes of the arches and the sand, the ghosts of the gladiators, and the cultural monument that has stood as a figure of power, violence, and the passage of time in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Colosseum’s ruined arches frame poems of imperial memory and vanished spectacle; Modern verse stands inside the stone oval to hear the ghosts of the games; “The Colosseum held the silence of a million vanished roars” demonstrates historical echo; Educational poetry shows the building as the ultimate architecture of public contest; Poets return to its tiers whenever the scale of human display must be measured against time.
Additional Notes
The Colosseum’s ruined grandeur has become a portable emblem of imperial spectacle and its aftermath. Poets who invoke the building usually wish to stage the relationship between vanished power and present observation. Classroom discussion can usefully examine how the ruin itself becomes a kind of arena for modern reflection. Related structures include the amphitheatre and the circus. The image rewards attention to the difference between the original games and the later tourism of memory.
Also Known As
Flavian Amphitheatre Coliseum
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