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

de profundis

Latin Phrases
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

From the depths; the opening of Psalm 130, a cry from despair to God for mercy and redemption.

Detailed Definition
De profundis, "from the depths," opens Psalm 130's penitential cry from despair to God. In poetry, this phrase signals utterance from extremity, voice emerging from suffering's nadir. Poets invoke it when writing from crisis, when documenting descent into mental illness, grief, or spiritual desolation. The phrase carries both liturgical weight and psychological accuracy, naming the place from which certain poems must speak. Oscar Wilde used it for his prison letter. It appears in confessional verse, elegies, and poems of desperation, where speakers locate themselves in depths—psychological, spiritual, or circumstantial—and cry upward, whether toward divine rescue or simply toward acknowledgment that they have reached bottom and survived to testify.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem of desperation opens "De profundis I cry to you"; Oscar Wilde's prison letter took the title "De profundis"; Contemporary confessional verse invokes the phrase: "De profundis—from the depths of depression I write"; A religious poem might pray "De profundis, from the pit, I call upward"; Verse about crisis employs "de profundis" to mark extremity; An elegy might locate speech "de profundis, from the deepest grief"
Additional Notes
De profundis opens Psalm 130—"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord." Oscar Wilde used the phrase as title for his prison letter, making it permanently associated with utterance from extremity. Poets invoke de profundis when writing from crisis, when locating speech at suffering's nadir, when crying upward from the pit. The phrase is simultaneously liturgical formula and accurate psychological description—certain states do feel like depths from which one calls. Related to confession, witness, and testimony from limit experiences. Useful for understanding confessional poetry, poems about mental illness or addiction, elegies, and works emerging from any extremity. The phrase suggests that some truths can only be spoken from the bottom, that depth grants certain authority, that surviving the descent and testifying about it has value. De profundis names both the place of utterance and the direction of address—from below, toward above.
Also Known As
out of the depths
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