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

Denial

Psychology
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

A psychological defense mechanism reflected in poetry through language that rejects painful truths, often via understatement, evasion, or irony.

Detailed Definition
Denial is a common defense against trauma or loss. In poetry, it appears as insistence on false hope, avoidance of key imagery, or euphemistic language, subtly revealing the speaker’s inability to confront unbearable truths.
Example
Example in poetry:
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” denial appears in the refrain “That is not it at all”; In Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” denial masks suicidal intent with theatricality; In Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” the husband denies his wife’s grief, saying “You—oh, you think it’s a child’s death”; In W.B. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” denial of trauma is implied in Leda’s ambiguous aftermath; In Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” the speaker insists loss “isn’t hard to master,” despite evident pain; In Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse,” denial of parental influence is undercut by its very articulation.
Additional Notes
Denial—a refusal to accept reality—is a common defense mechanism that poetry often exposes through dramatic irony; e.g., Frost’s husband in “Home Burial” denies his wife’s grief; poetic techniques include understatement, euphemism, or refrain that contradicts content; useful for students to track how denial unravels across a poem; distinguish from ignorance—denial implies subconscious awareness.
Also Known As
Disavowal Refusal to acknowledge Repudiation Self-deception Negation
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