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

Dowie

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

A Scots adjective meaning sad, dull, dreary, or downcast with grief; in dialect poetry, it colors mood and landscape, evoking the heavy melancholy of loss or the oppressive weight of dreary weather.

Detailed Definition
"Dowie" describes a gentle, pervasive sadness — not dramatic grief but the low, grey quality of prolonged sorrow or weariness. It appears in elegies, laments, and poems of winter landscape, evoking the particular Scottish experience of long, dark, wet seasons and personal loss. The word's soft sounds suit its meaning, and it captures an emotional register between depression and acceptance that is central to the tradition of Scots elegy. "Dowie" is the mood of a November afternoon, of empty rooms and absent friends, and poetry has no better word for it.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Dowie" means sad, melancholy, or drooping with grief; A poet might write: "The dowie widow sat apart / wi' winter settled in her heart." for an elegy; "The dowie birch in winter stands, / its branches empty, outstretched hands." applies the mood to nature; "She sang a dowie tune by the shore — / the kind that breaks ye at the core." links music to grief; "The dowie months dragged slow and grey / until the first wee signs of May." captures prolonged sorrow; "A dowie eye can hold a world — / of losses folded, tightly furled." explores how sadness condenses experience; "Dowie the dawn when love has fled — / the sky itself goes cold and dead." externalises grief in landscape
Additional Notes
Dowie fills a gap that English struggles to fill with a single word — that particular quality of sadness that is also weariness and dullness combined, without the drama of grief or the sharpness of pain. It is the mood of grey days, empty rooms, and the aftermath of loss. In Scots song and lyric it appears frequently in contexts of longing and absence — the landscape turning "dowie" in sympathy with the speaker's mood, a characteristic pathetic fallacy. Students should compare "dowie" with "dreich" (dreary weather) and "eerie" (uncanny unease) to understand the precise emotional register each word occupies. Together they form a vocabulary of negative atmosphere unique to Scots.
Also Known As
Melancholy Gloomy Low-spirited
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