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.

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 and stormy night

Idiomatic Phrase
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

Dark and stormy night: a famously clichéd opening for sinister or melodramatic narrative; Bulwer-Lytton's notorious sentence made this a byword for overwrought weather-setting in fiction.

Detailed Definition
Atmospheric tension. Poetry parodies or embraces for gothic mood, mystery, foreshadowing peril in narrative verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
A parody might begin on a dark and stormy night to mock melodramatic openings; In a gothic poem, the phrase can set a knowingly theatrical mood; The phrase suits poems that play with cliché and suspense; A poet could use it ironically when the real terror is inside the house.
Additional Notes
Dark and stormy night is famous as a melodramatic opening cliché, associated with Gothic and sensational fiction. In poetry it can be used sincerely for atmosphere, but more often works as parody or self-aware exaggeration. It is useful for teaching cliché because the phrase shows how stock weather can become predictable shorthand. A poet can renew it by adding precise, unexpected details.
Also Known As
clichéd opening
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