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

desperatio

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

A Latin noun meaning hopelessness or despair; in poetry, it denotes an abject psychological state, often linked with tragic characters facing unalterable fate or loss of agency.

Detailed Definition
Desperatio names the extreme psychological state of having exhausted all hope. In poetry, it appears in tragic verse, laments, and the dark night of the soul tradition in devotional writing. It is a state of particular creative and spiritual significance, as it represents both an ending and potentially a beginning: the point at which ordinary resources fail and something new must emerge. Poets explore desperatio not merely as a negative state but as a threshold experience of profound transformation.
Example
Example in poetry:
The dark night of the soul tradition in devotional poetry — St. John of the Cross, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Merton — is the great tradition of desperatio transformed into spiritual resource; Hopkins's "terrible sonnets," particularly "No worst, there is none," document desperatio at its most extreme — a state in which all consolation fails and only the abyss remains; A student writing about depression, grief, or spiritual crisis might study the desperatio poems to learn how language can approach the very limits of its own adequacy; Dante's opening line — "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood" — is the beginning of a desperatio narrative that must be traversed before the ascent to Paradise is possible; Samuel Beckett's influence on poetry introduced a new form of desperatio — not the anguished cry but the flat, exhausted voice that has given up even on giving up
Additional Notes
Desperatio is a term with important theological valences: in Christian moral theology, despair (desperatio) is traditionally classified as a sin against hope, one of the theological virtues, because it involves giving up on the possibility of divine mercy or redemption. Students should note that this classification means that the desperatio poem — the poem of absolute hopelessness — carries a moral charge in a Christian framework that it lacks in a secular one: the speaker is not merely suffering but is in a state of spiritual danger. Hopkins's terrible sonnets are desperate in precisely this theological sense, which is part of what makes them so charged with moral and spiritual urgency. Related terms include tristitia (sadness, a capital sin in medieval moral theology), acedia (spiritual sluggishness or apathy, often associated with despair), and the mystical concept of derelictio (divine abandonment or desolation).
Also Known As
despair hopelessness total despair
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