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

Displacement

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

Redirecting emotions from a threatening target to a safer substitute.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

How to Scan a Poem — Scansion is the practice of listening closely to a poem’s rhythm and marking its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is not a way of forcing every line into a formula, but a method for hearing how regularity, variation and natural speech work together.

Detailed Definition
Displacement allows indirect expression of anger or desire. Poetry uses it metaphorically—venting grief onto nature, or love onto inanimate objects—enabling emotional release while maintaining psychological safety and poetic subtlety.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” displacement redirects anger from father to husband (“I made a model of you”); In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” displacement channels obsession into murder; In W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” societal pressures displace personal grief onto bureaucratic metrics; In Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” displacement transforms identity into weaponized metaphor; In Langston Hughes’ “Harlem,” displacement of racial frustration manifests as explosive imagery; In Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” displacement allows exploration of trauma through allegory.
Additional Notes
Displacement—redirecting emotion from a threatening to a safer target—is a key defense mechanism (Freud); in poetry, it appears as metaphor (anger at father redirected to husband in Plath’s “Daddy”) or symbolic action; useful for students to trace the emotional trajectory: What is the original source, and where is it displaced?; note its creative potential—displacement fuels much lyric metaphor.
Also Known As
Transference Redirection Substitution Exile Homesickness Projection
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