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

commerce

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

Commerce is a card game involving the exchange of cards to form better combinations, popular in the eighteenth century.

Detailed Definition
Commerce enters poetry as a metaphor for the trade of advantages and the improvement of one's position. In literary contexts it represents the fluid negotiation of value. Poets use its exchanges to explore themes of bargaining, the discarding of the inferior, and the pursuit of a stronger hand through mutual or competitive trade.
Example
Example in poetry:
Commerce’s exchange of cards supplies poets with images of mutual improvement and calculated trade; Verse of the parlor uses the game for the quiet negotiation of advantage; “They played commerce until each hand was stronger than before” illustrates constructive dealing; Educational lines show the sport as the polite form of barter; Poets invoke commerce when the improvement of one’s position depends on what another is willing to give.
Additional Notes
Commerce’s exchange of cards emphasizes mutual improvement and calculated trade rather than pure chance or pure deception. The game’s quieter tempo suits domestic or meditative registers. Classroom discussion can explore how the language of commercial exchange migrates into the language of the card table. Related combination games include the various European trading games. The image works well when the poet needs reciprocity without the high temperature of the bluff.
Also Known As
Trade Exchange Barter
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