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

diis aliter visum

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

The gods thought otherwise; a recognition that divine will may contradict human desires and plans.

Detailed Definition
Diis aliter visum appears in Virgil's Aeneid and encapsulates the tragic disparity between human hope and divine or cosmic decision. In poetry, it is a formula of resignation and of the acknowledgment that fate operates beyond human understanding or control. It appears in elegies, tragic verse, and poems dealing with sudden loss or thwarted plans, giving grief a kind of philosophical dignity. The phrase does not console but acknowledges, with a kind of stern beauty, the limits of human agency.
Example
Example in poetry:
Virgil's use of diis aliter visum in the Aeneid to describe the destruction of Troy — the gods decided otherwise — gives the phrase its characteristic tone of resigned grief before the inexplicable; Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" is a supreme diis aliter visum poem — the immanent will that shaped the iceberg for the Titanic decided otherwise than all the human plans; A student writing about a sudden, unexpected loss might structure their poem around diis aliter visum — the contrast between what was expected and what the gods or fate decided; A.E. Housman's poetry is pervaded by diis aliter visum — the young men whose lives were decided otherwise by wars, diseases, and random misfortune they had no power to anticipate or prevent; A poet writing about medical diagnosis, natural disaster, or sudden bereavement must reckon with diis aliter visum — the moment when fate overrides the human plan with absolute and indifferent authority
Additional Notes
Diis aliter visum appears in Virgil's Aeneid (II, 428), where it refers to the death of Ripheus, described as the most just man among the Trojans, whose death nevertheless seemed good to the gods: dis aliter visum. The phrase has an almost unbearable irony in context — the most just man dies, and the only explanation is that the gods saw things differently. Students should note that this phrase is one of the most important expressions in all of Latin poetry of the problem of theodicy — why the good suffer, why the innocent die — and it faces the problem without offering a consolation. The gods are not wrong, nor are they unjust; they simply see differently from us, and their vision overrides our sense of what should happen. This is a more radical and unsettling position than either the Stoic acceptance of fate or the Christian faith in divine providence.
Also Known As
the gods thought otherwise the gods decided otherwise dis aliter visum
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