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.

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

Dog eat dog

Idiomatic Phrase
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 ruthlessly competitive situation in which people will harm or exploit others to succeed; a merciless contest for survival.

Detailed Definition
Rooted in the idea that even members of the same species will prey on each other when driven by desperation, this idiom captures the logic of unregulated competition. In poetry, it appears in critiques of capitalism, colonialism, and social Darwinism—systems where the powerful consume the weak under the guise of natural law. Poets deploy its animal imagery to defamiliarize economic cruelty, making familiar systems feel as barbaric as they are. The phrase also invites reflection on what distinguishes human community from animal competition, making it productive in philosophical and political verse. Its rhythmic repetition—dog eat dog—mimics the relentless cycles of exploitation it describes.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about the competitive brutality of an unregulated market might use dog eat dog to defamiliarize what economic language normalizes — the cruelty made visible when described in the language of predatory nature; In a satirical poem about the entertainment industry, dog eat dog captures the atmosphere of an environment where the pretense of collegiality barely conceals the ruthlessness with which careers are advanced at others' expense; The idiom's animal imagery allows a poet to place human competitive behavior in an evolutionary context, asking whether the dog-eat-dog logic of capitalism is nature or culture — inevitable or chosen; A poem about war might use dog eat dog to capture the logic of combat reduced to its most basic register — survival at the cost of the soldier beside you, the social contract dissolved in the extremity of violence; In a poem about gentrification, dog eat dog names what happens to a neighborhood when market forces are allowed to determine who can stay — the community that existed before the development an earlier meal; The phrase suits poems about political power where the speaker refuses to euphemize the actual mechanism of advancement — not ambition or talent but the willingness to consume what stands between you and what you want
Additional Notes
This phrase depicts ruthless competition and moral scarcity. In poetry, it can criticise capitalism, court politics, school rivalry, or survival under pressure. The animal image is deliberately harsh, suggesting a world where kinship collapses into predation. Related terms include “blood in the water,” “survival of the fittest,” wolves, scraps, teeth, and social Darwinist imagery.
Also Known As
Cutthroat Survival of the fittest
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