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 D

Dark Ages

Historical And Literary Periods
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 period roughly from 500-1000 CE following the Roman Empire's collapse in the West, characterized by societal fragmentation, limited literacy, and reduced cultural output. Later historians challenged the negative characterization.

Detailed Definition
The Dark Ages inspired medieval and later poetry through reflection on civilization's collapse and cultural loss. Poets drew on fragmentary sources and mythologized the period. This era appears in poetry through elegies for lost Roman civilization, celebration of surviving cultural fragments, creation of mythic narratives about the past, exploration of barbarism and civilization, religious faith amid darkness, and the construction of historical narratives through poetry, establishing the period as a crucial reference point for understanding civilization's fragility.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem using imagery of ruined Roman roads, isolated monasteries, and a pervasive sense of intellectual and social regression, evoking the Dark Ages; A lyrical work focusing on the grim reality of famine, plague, or barbarian invasion; A poem written in an archaic, Latin-influenced diction to convey a sense of historical distance and weight; A work focusing on the preservation of knowledge by a solitary scribe in a scriptorium.
Additional Notes
The Dark Ages (5th–10th centuries) were once viewed as culturally stagnant but produced rich oral and religious poetry. Works like Beowulf and early Christian hymns reveal heroism, faith, and community ethics. It bridges classical decline and medieval renewal.
Also Known As
Dark Age Early Middle Ages Medieval Dark Ages
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