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

Complexity

Metaphysics
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

The quality of being intricate, multifaceted, and resistant to simple interpretation. Metaphysical poetry deliberately embraces intellectual and imaginative difficulty to match the complexity of philosophical inquiry.

Detailed Definition
Metaphysical poets reject simplicity and easy answers, instead building complex webs of interconnected ideas, paradoxes, and conceits. This complexity honors the genuine difficulty of metaphysical questions while engaging sophisticated readers in active interpretation, demanding that readers think as rigorously as poets do about love, faith, death, and eternity.
Example
Example in poetry:
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” layers myth, history, and personal voice into a complex poetic tapestry; John Donne’s “The Canonization” intertwines erotic, spiritual, and political registers; Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” presents multifaceted perspectives on a single image; Emily Dickinson’s compressed syntax and slant rhyme create emotional and intellectual complexity; Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” blends personal crisis, mythic allusion, and linguistic intensity; Dante’s “Divine Comedy” weaves theology, politics, and autobiography into a cosmic narrative.
Additional Notes
Complexity in metaphysical thought embraces layered realities—ontological, epistemological, theological—and resists simplification; metaphysical poetry mirrors this through syntactic intricacy, conceptual density, and tonal shifts, inviting readers to dwell in ambiguity: Herbert’s “Prayer” condenses cosmic, liturgical, and emotional dimensions into a single, labyrinthine definition.
Also Known As
Intricacy Layeredness Multifacetedness Density
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