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

Davenport china

Ceramics
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

Davenport china is English porcelain produced by the Davenport factory, featuring fine gilding and patterns.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Davenport represents Regency-era luxury and precision. Poets reference it for scenes of formal dining and inherited grace. It supports themes of lineage, ceremony, and polished surfaces hiding depth. Davenport china grounds literary reflections on status and time.
Example
Example in poetry:
Davenport china — produced in Longport, Staffordshire, from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century — appears in domestic poems as a mark of provincial respectability, its wares sound if not spectacular; A poem about a Staffordshire family's pride might include "the Davenport service, bought at the works and never replaced — sixty years of Sunday dinners and still not a chip"; Davenport's wide range — from cheap printed earthenware to fine porcelain — makes it a useful image for poems exploring the spectrum of Victorian taste and income; In a poem about a Victorian pantry, the Davenport plates stacked on their shelf represent the factory's achievement: reliable, unpretentious, made to last; The factory's closure in 1887 — a casualty of changing tastes and industrial competition — suits poems about the passing of the Victorian era's domestic certainties; A poem about a rural auction might include "a dozen Davenport plates in the willow pattern, the lot going for less than the auctioneer's fee."
Additional Notes
The Davenport factory, operating at Longport, Staffordshire from 1793 to 1887, produced a wide range of ceramics including earthenware, bone china, and stone china, distinguished by fine gilding and well-designed floral and landscape patterns. The firm supplied both domestic and export markets. The Davenport name in ceramic scholarship is often associated with the respectable middle-tier of English ceramic production — well made, attractively decorated, but not as fashionable as the top-tier factories. In catalogues and auctions, Davenport pieces are valued for their consistency and period charm rather than as masterworks of ceramic art.
Also Known As
Davenport porcelain
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