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

desiderium

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

Longing, desire, or grief for something lost; an intense yearning for an absent person or thing.

Detailed Definition
Desiderium captures one of the most poignant of human emotional states: the longing for what is absent, lost, or irrecoverable. In poetry, it is closely related to the elegiac mode and the Romantic concept of Sehnsucht. It appears in love poetry, poems of exile, and poems of grief where the desired object, whether person, place, or time, is irretrievably gone. The word combines erotic desire with grief, making it one of the richest single words in the Latin poetic vocabulary.
Example
Example in poetry:
Catullus's longing for his dead brother is the classical Latin model of desiderium — the yearning for a loved one irretrievably gone; Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" is a Victorian desiderium — the poet longing for his dead friend Arthur Hugh Clough through the landscape they once shared; A student writing about exile — physical or emotional — might explore desiderium as the dominant emotional register; the longing for what is absent giving the poem its painful intensity; Rilke's "Duino Elegies" are saturated with desiderium — the longing for angels, for beauty, for the dead, for a fullness of being that remains always just out of reach; W.B. Yeats's poems to Maud Gonne are extended studies in desiderium — the longing for the beloved who remains absent giving the poems their characteristic quality of beautiful, aching incompleteness
Additional Notes
Desiderium is related to the Latin word desiderare (to desire, to miss, to feel the absence of), which is itself connected to the root sidus (star) — to desire something is literally to look at the stars and feel the absence of a guiding constellation. Students should note this etymological connection to the stars, which gives desiderium a cosmic and navigational dimension: the longing is not just for an absent person but for orientation, for the star by which one steers. This astronomical metaphor is particularly rich for poetic analysis. Desiderium should be distinguished from cupiditas (selfish desire for what one does not have), amor (love for what is present or remembered), and spes (hope directed toward the future). The word occupies the precise emotional space of elegy: grieving a specific, irreplaceable absence.
Also Known As
longing yearning desire for the lost the longing
Skip to main content