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

desolation

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

A key emotional and landscape term in Anglo-Irish poetry, describing the bleak, abandoned quality of post-Famine and post-conquest Irish terrain, laden with historical grief and cultural loss.

Detailed Definition
While desolation is an English word, its appearance as a category in Irish poetry studies reflects its special weight in the Anglo-Irish literary tradition, where it names something beyond ordinary emptiness. The desolate landscapes of the west of Ireland — cleared hillsides, ruined cottages, abandoned villages — became charged aesthetic objects in nineteenth and twentieth-century verse, simultaneously geographical description and historical indictment. Poets from James Clarence Mangan to Patrick Kavanagh used desolation to name a spiritual condition as much as a physical one, and the word carries the full burden of colonial history, famine, and emigration that shaped the Irish experience of place.
Example
Example in poetry:
Desolation permeates the landscape after the famine's devastation; The poet walks through desolation where once vibrant communities thrived; Desolation becomes both physical reality and spiritual condition in post-famine verse; Images of desolation challenge romantic notions of Irish rural beauty; The desolation of abandoned cottages speaks louder than words in memorial poetry; Modern poets confront desolation to process historical trauma and resilience.
Additional Notes
Desolation in Anglo-Irish poetry often describes the physical and emotional aftermath of the Famine, colonization, or emigration. It is a stark contrast to the romanticized images of rural Ireland, revealing the harsh realities of poverty and abandonment. Poets use desolation to critique political neglect and to mourn lost communities. This term carries heavy historical weight, invoking images of empty cottages, barren fields, and silenced voices. It is a key concept for understanding the trauma embedded in modern Irish literary landscape.
Also Known As
despair bleakness abandonment ruin Loneliness uaigneas
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