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

Contemplation

World Religion
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 deep, prolonged, and attentive form of prayer or meditation focused on the divine, beyond discursive thought.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Faith and Doubt in Poetry — Poetry has long been a place for speaking towards God, searching for meaning, resisting certainty and giving shape to silence. This guide explores devotional traditions and poems of doubt while offering practical ways to read and listen across differing beliefs.

Detailed Definition
Contemplation is the silent, loving gaze of the soul upon God, central to Christian mysticism (e.g., Teresa of Avila) and paralleled in Eastern meditation. In poetry, the state of contemplation is both a subject and a goal. Poets attempt to evoke the peace, clarity, and wordless union of the contemplative state. The poem itself can become an object of contemplation or a record of the insights gained from such a state. It represents the highest form of knowing, not through intellect but through direct, intuitive experience of the sacred.
Example
Example in poetry:
In monastic poetry, Contemplation is silent communion: “The mind stills—God speaks in the space between thoughts”; In Rumi’s verse, contemplation is love’s deep gaze: “Look long enough, and the Beloved appears in the mirror of your chest”; In Zen poetry, contemplation is non-dual awareness: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing—spring comes, grass grows”; Contemporary poets describe contemplation as resistance to noise: “In the storm of headlines, I choose the quiet.”
Additional Notes
Contemplation (theoria in Greek, dhyana in Sanskrit) moves beyond discursive prayer to silent presence; practiced in Christian hesychasm, Sufi dhikr, and Buddhist meditation, it seeks direct encounter with the divine; poets describe it through images of still water, empty sky, or breath—emphasizing receptivity over expression, yet paradoxically inspiring some of the most luminous verse.
Also Known As
Meditation Prayerful Reflection Reverie Theoria
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