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

cricket

Games
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

Cricket is a bat-and-ball team sport involving innings, wickets, and the contest between bat and ball.

Detailed Definition
Cricket enters poetry as a profound metaphor for the English character, the test of endurance, and the complex rules of fair play. In literary tradition it symbolizes the civilized contest. Poets use the pitch, the overs, and the wickets to explore themes of patience, the sudden fall of the bails, and the national game that mirrors the rhythms of society and history.
Example
Example in poetry:
Cricket’s long afternoon and falling wickets appear in poems of English patience and sudden drama; Verse of the summer game lets the pitch and the overs carry larger cultural meanings; “The last wicket fell and the day exhaled” demonstrates the formal end of effort; Educational examples show the sport as a mirror of national character and time; Poets return to cricket whenever endurance and the weather must share the same sentence.
Additional Notes
Cricket’s long form, falling wickets, and weather-dependent drama have made it a durable emblem of English patience and sudden reversal. The game’s technical language—overs, maidens, silly mid-off—rewards poets who wish to linger in the specialized vocabulary of the pitch. Classroom discussion can usefully examine how the sport’s tempo shapes the tempo of the verse that describes it. Related bat-and-ball games include baseball and rounders. The image remains powerful because the contest can last five days and still end in a draw.
Also Known As
The Gentleman's Game The Cricket Match The Willow Sport
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