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

corset

Apparel
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 supportive undergarment worn to shape the torso, constructed with stiffening elements and lacing, appearing in poetry as a symbol of femininity, discipline, and the pressure of social norms.

Detailed Definition
The corset occupies a complex and often contentious place in modern poetic imagination, frequently invoked in feminist and historical verse to critique the constraints of patriarchal beauty standards. Yet it also appears in Victorian and Romantic poetry as a garment of elegance, enhancing the natural waist and creating the desired silhouette. Its steel or whalebone structure and tight lacing require assistance to don, making scenes of corset-tying intimate or laborious. Poets use the corset to explore themes of breath, suffocation, and bodily autonomy; its removal is often a moment of freedom or surrender. In love poetry, the corset's stiff exterior conceals a beating heart, and in humorous verse, a broken stay or popped lace produces comic embarrassment. Its historical evolution also mirrors changing attitudes toward female agency.
Example
Example in poetry:
"The corset makes me pretty. The corset makes me perfect. It constricts me, controls me" (FictionPress); "How She Felt In Her First Corset... the girl was rigged out as the mother desired" (Matt W. Alderson); "A Red Corset tightly keeps everything in! All her sweetness of soul and her whiteness of skin concealed beneath rubies"; "cane, cravats, and corsets tell" (Poetry Foundation); "The corset's whalebone ribs held her like a cage of virtue"; "She unlaced her corset and let the century fall from her shoulders"; "The corset was both armor and prison, shaping her into someone else's dream"
Additional Notes
The corset occupies a complex and often contentious place in modern poetic imagination, frequently invoked in feminist and historical verse to critique the constraints of patriarchal beauty standards. Yet it also appears in Victorian and Romantic poetry as a garment of elegance, enhancing the natural waist and creating the desired silhouette. Its steel or whalebone structure and tight lacing require assistance to don, making scenes of corset-tying intimate or laborious. Poets use the corset to explore themes of breath, suffocation, and bodily autonomy; its removal is often a moment of freedom or surrender. In love poetry, the corset's stiff exterior conceals a beating heart, and in humorous verse, a broken stay or popped lace produces comic embarrassment. Related terms include stays, bodice, and corselet. Students should note the corset's ability to function as both a symbol of oppression and a tool of empowerment, depending on poetic context, and its historical evolution mirrors changing attitudes toward female agency and the body.
Also Known As
stays bodice waist trainer
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