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

Art
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

An artistic mode associated with luxury, decline, artificiality, and sensual excess. In poetry, it often turns beauty into a sign of unease or exhaustion.

Detailed Definition
Decadence became a prominent late nineteenth-century aesthetic associated with elaborate style, cultivated sensation, moral ambiguity, and fascination with decline. Decadent poetry may luxuriate in rare colors, perfumes, jewels, illness, ruins, and artificial pleasures. Its surface richness often carries a darker awareness of social decay, spiritual fatigue, or self-conscious performance, making beauty feel both alluring and unstable rather than innocent or purely celebratory.
Example
Example in poetry:
Oscar Wilde’s lush, sensuous style offers poets a model for decadence, emphasizing artifice, beauty, and cultivated excess; Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” uses rich musical language and weary desire associated with Decadent poetry; A decadent poem might linger over faded velvet, crushed orchids, perfume, and gilded decay rather than celebrate natural simplicity; A poet can evoke decadence by making beauty feel luxurious but exhausted, as in an image of jewels glittering in an abandoned ballroom
Additional Notes
Decadence often uses rich sensory detail, rare objects, stylized beauty, and a mood of weariness or moral instability. In a poem, lavish language may be pleasurable but also unsettling, suggesting that refinement masks emptiness, decay, or excess. Related ideas include aestheticism and fin de siècle art.
Other Meanings of “Decadence”
Also Known As
Decadent Movement Decadentism
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