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

Dour

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

Stern, stubborn, and unyielding; grimly resolute or humourlessly severe.

Detailed Definition
"Dour" is perhaps the most internationally recognised characterisation of the Scottish temperament, the grim, unsmiling refusal to be impressed or delighted. In poetry it appears as both critique and celebration, depending on context — dourness as social failing or as admirable resistance to nonsense and superficiality. Burns satirises the dour Presbyterian in "Holy Willie's Prayer," while later poets use it with more ambivalence. The word's hard consonants and closed vowel enact the quality it describes, making it a small self-fulfilling prophecy of Scottish character.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Dour" means stern, stubborn, grim, or humourless; A poet might write: "The dour grey sky refused tae clear — / a fitting backdrop tae the year." uses weather to express mood; "He was dour as weathered granite, / shaped by wind and slow to man it." characterises resilience through hardness; "Behind her dour and careful face / lay warmth she kept in its proper place." subverts expectation; "Dour the road that climbs the brae, / but fairer still at close of day." redeems hardship with perspective; "The dour land yields its gifts in time — / patience is its native rhyme." applies the word to agricultural endurance; "Even dour men weep at last — / when love proves stronger than the past." reveals hidden tenderness
Additional Notes
Dour has crossed from Scots into general English usage, which is a mark of how precisely it fills a semantic need. It captures a particular kind of grim, unyielding resistance — not cruelty but an implacable refusal to yield or to show weakness — that has become associated with a particular Scottish character type. In poetry it often functions as a term of complicated respect: the "dour" figure is hard to love but impossible to break. For students, the word is important both as a character descriptor and as a cultural marker. Its appearance in poetry often signals the entrance of an older, more severe moral world — the world of Calvinist Scotland, of hard weather and harder theology.
Also Known As
Stern Hard Severe Grim
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