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

Doxa

Philosophy
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

Doxa refers to common belief or popular opinion, contrasted with episteme (true knowledge). It denotes uncritical acceptance of societal norms.

Detailed Definition
Poets interrogate doxa by disrupting clichés or exposing ideological assumptions through irony, ambiguity, or counter-narratives. By challenging shared illusions, poetry becomes a site of epistemological resistance—inviting readers to see beyond the veil of conventional wisdom into contested truths.
Example
Example in poetry:
Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” satirizes unthinking adherence to fashionable taste; William Blake’s “London” exposes doxa in “mind-forg’d manacles” of church and state; Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” critiques patriarchal myths as accepted truth; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen unpacks racial microaggressions as normalized doxa; W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” parodies bureaucratic conformity; Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” questions inherited maxims like “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Additional Notes
Doxa (Greek for “common belief”) is uncritical opinion, opposed to episteme (knowledge). In poetry, doxa appears as cliché, proverb, or social norm that the poem interrogates—Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors,” Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen.” Poets expose doxa’s violence: how it masks power as commonsense. Students should identify moments where the poem breaks from collective voice into singular insight. Related to ideology (Althusser), false consciousness (Marx), and hermeneutics of suspicion. Professors can use it to discuss poetry’s role in ideological critique.
Also Known As
Opinion Common belief Received opinion
Skip to main content