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

Decadence

Philosophy
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

Decadence signifies cultural or moral decline marked by excessive refinement, artificiality, and loss of vital force. It critiques modernity’s spiritual exhaustion.

Detailed Definition
Poets of decadence use lush, ornate language to explore decay as both aesthetic and philosophical condition. This stance reveals tension between beauty and corruption, often framing art as last sanctuary in a disenchanted world—elevating style into ethical resistance or melancholic elegy.
Example
Example in poetry:
Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal aestheticizes moral decay and urban corruption; Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” frames prison as decadent spectacle of fallen grandeur; W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” depicts civilization’s ornate collapse; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (prose-adjacent) uses baroque syntax to evoke spiritual exhaustion; Hart Crane’s The Bridge juxtaposes industrial grandeur with spiritual vacancy; Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (influential on poetry) celebrates artificiality over nature as decadent ideal.
Additional Notes
Decadence, as cultural diagnosis (Nietzsche, Huysmans), signifies exhaustion of vital forms through hyper-refinement. In poetry, it manifests as ornate diction, morbid themes, or aestheticism over ethics—Baudelaire’s “Carrion,” Wilde’s Salomé. But modern poets (e.g., Plath, Rich) often reappropriate decadence as feminist or queer resistance: excess becomes defiance. Students should distinguish historical Decadent movement (1890s) from philosophical decadence as symptom of nihilism. Related to kitsch, hyperreality, and hybris—but more culturally diagnostic than moralistic.
Other Meanings of “Decadence”
Also Known As
Degeneracy Degeneration Decline Belle Époque Decadence
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