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

Deasil

Dialect
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

In the direction of the sun; clockwise. The auspicious direction opposed to widdershins.

Detailed Definition
"Deasil" is the sunwise, fortunate direction, moving with the natural path of the sun from east to south to west. In folk tradition and superstition, moving deasil brings luck, blessing, and alignment with the natural order, and it appears in poems of ceremony, healing, and seasonal celebration. Its contrast with "widdershins" is essential to the symbolic geography of Scottish folk verse, where the direction of movement signals alignment with or transgression against the powers of nature. The word carries a quiet, solar warmth that makes it a gentle presence in any poem.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Deasil" means to move clockwise, especially in a sunwise ritual direction; A poet might write: "She walked deasil around the well — / the old rites held a powerful spell." grounds folk ritual in landscape; "Move deasil round the hearthstone, slow, / three times before the embers glow." preserves domestic ceremony; "The dancers moved deasil through the mist, / the mountain watching, sunwise kissed." links movement to spiritual practice; "Deasil the seasons wheel and turn, / each in its time returning, stern." applies the term to cosmic time; "He walked deasil through the old stone ring — / perhaps the stones remembered everything." uses the word to access mystery
Additional Notes
Deasil is one of the most culturally resonant words in the Scots-Gaelic tradition, connecting everyday movement to ancient cosmological belief. The sun's direction — clockwise in the northern hemisphere — was the auspicious, life-affirming direction; to move "deasil" around a sacred object, a fire, or a person was to bless them. Its opposite, "widdershins" (anticlockwise), was the direction of curses, witches, and misfortune. In poetry, both words carry enormous mythological weight, invoking pre-Christian beliefs that were never entirely suppressed. Students interested in folk belief, ritual, and the supernatural in Scottish poetry will find "deasil" and "widdershins" among the most evocative terms in the tradition.
Also Known As
Deiseal Sunwise Clockwise
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