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

cudgeling

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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

Cudgeling is the fighting or sport with cudgels or short sticks, a form of stick fighting.

Detailed Definition
Cudgeling enters poetry as a rustic emblem of blunt combat and the cracked heads of the fair or the street. In folk literature it symbolizes the rough justice of the stick. Poets use the cudgel to explore themes of the simple weapon, the measured blow, and the traditional contests that turn the staff into an instrument of play or punishment.
Example
Example in poetry:
Cudgeling’s short sticks and cracked crowns appear in poems of rustic and fairground combat; Folk verse uses the sport for the blunt settlement of scores; “They cudgelled until the blood and the laughter mixed” illustrates rough justice; Educational lines present the game as the training ground for later swordplay; Poets invoke the cudgel when the contest requires no edge sharper than wood.
Additional Notes
Cudgeling’s short sticks and cracked crowns preserve the memory of combat that is both practical and slightly comic. The sport’s association with the fair and the training yard allows poets to lower the register of violence without losing its physical reality. Teachers may pair cudgeling with singlestick to show the continuum of stick-fighting practices. Related weapons include the quarterstaff and the later single-stick. The term works best when the contest must feel rough, local, and still governed by rules.
Also Known As
cudgelling
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