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

combe

Landscape
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 combe is a small, usually steep-sided valley or hollow in hilly country, especially in southern and western Britain.

Detailed Definition
In Landscape description, a combe is a narrow valley, often enclosed by rounded or wooded slopes and sometimes containing a stream. The word is especially associated with place names and rural scenery in Wales and southwest England. Poets use combe to evoke an intimate, sheltered feature of a natural Landscape rather than a broad, open valley.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “In the Valley of the Elwy,” the speaker praises the Welsh countryside: “Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales.” Here, combes refers to the smaller hollows or narrow valleys among the Landscape’s woods and meadows. By placing “combes” beside “vales,” Hopkins suggests a varied terrain, from enclosed dips in the hills to wider valleys.
Additional Notes
Combe is chiefly a British term, particularly common in southern and western England and in Wales. It is closely related in meaning to cwm, the Welsh word for a valley or hollow; cwm is often used for a steep, bowl-shaped mountain valley. The spelling coombe is also common, especially in English place names such as Ilfracombe and Castle Combe. Do not confuse a combe with a broad river valley: a combe is generally smaller, more enclosed, and associated with hills or slopes. The word comes into English through an old Celtic or Brittonic Landscape term meaning “valley” or “hollow.”
Also Known As
Coombe Hollow Narrow Valley Sheltered Dell coomb
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