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

Contagion

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

The transmission of disease from one person to another. In poetry it often symbolises the spread of emotions, ideas, or moral corruption.

Detailed Definition
Contagion originally described the direct spread of infectious illness through contact. In earlier centuries, when epidemics were common and poorly understood, the word carried strong associations with fear and invisibility. Poets and writers adopted contagion as a powerful metaphor for the way feelings, behaviours, or moral influences can pass from person to person. Love, hatred, panic, and social unrest are often described as contagious forces, mirroring the unsettling unpredictability of disease spreading through a community.
Example
Example in poetry:
The contagion of fear spread faster than the virus itself; Poets speak of the contagion of laughter in a crowd; He warned against the moral contagion of the city; The contagion of war infected neighboring neutral nations; She tried to isolate herself from the social contagion; Love is described as a sweet contagion in many sonnets.
Additional Notes
Contagion refers to the transmission of disease between individuals, but in poetry the concept is often expanded metaphorically. Emotions, ideas, passions, and even moral corruption may spread like contagion through a community. The metaphor is particularly powerful in social and political poetry. Writers may describe laughter, fear, rebellion, or despair as contagious forces. The term highlights how human experience can move rapidly from one person to another, much like an epidemic of feeling or thought.
Other Meanings of “Contagion”
Also Known As
Infection Infectiousness Communicable Disease
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