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

Consumption

Medical Terms
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

An old name for tuberculosis, describing the gradual wasting away of the body. In poetry it often symbolises tragic beauty, fragility, and romantic suffering.

Detailed Definition
Consumption was the most common historical name for tuberculosis, derived from the idea that the disease slowly “consumed” the body. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was widespread and deeply feared, yet it acquired a strange cultural association with delicacy, heightened emotion, and artistic sensitivity. Poets frequently invoked consumption to represent slow decline, spiritual intensity, or doomed youth. The languid symptoms—pallor, thinness, and fading vitality—fit Romantic ideals of fragile beauty, making the illness a recurring symbol of mortality and poetic melancholy.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats and Byron are often associated with death by consumption; The poet described the consumption of the body by disease; Love was a consumption that ate away her sanity; The pale beauty of consumption was romanticized in verse; He wasted away from consumption in the damp climate; Consumption served as a metaphor for gradual destruction.
Additional Notes
Consumption was the historical name for tuberculosis and appears frequently in nineteenth century literature. The disease gradually wasted the body, giving rise to the romantic image of pale, fragile sufferers. Many poets used consumption as a symbol of tragic beauty, delicate sensitivity, and slow decline. Famous literary figures including John Keats were associated with it. The word consumption itself suggests being slowly consumed or eaten away, which strengthens its metaphorical power in poetic language.
Also Known As
Tuberculosis Pulmonary Tuberculosis TB Wasting Disease Phthisis Wasting
Skip to main content