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

Déploration

French
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 funerary poem expressing collective mourning at the death of an illustrious figure. A Renaissance occasional genre used to lament princes, poets, or patrons.

Detailed Definition
The déploration is a poetic genre of commission linked to the funerary rites of the French Renaissance. It amplifies individual complaint into collective lamentation, mobilizing rhetorical topoi and mythological references to magnify the deceased. Ronsard and Du Bellay composed celebrated examples. Its rigorous formal structure contrasts with the displayed emotional effusion, revealing the tension between rhetorical convention and poetic sincerity. It testifies to the social role of the poet as the communal voice of grief, officially sanctioned to speak loss on behalf of an entire society.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ronsard's "Élégie sur la mort de Joachim Du Bellay" is a déploration that mourns his friend and fellow poet with a combination of personal grief and literary argument, claiming that Du Bellay's death impoverishes French poetry itself; The Renaissance déploration typically mobilizes classical mythology, inviting the Muses, Orpheus, and the rivers of the classical landscape to join in mourning, creating a ceremonial frame that elevates individual loss to cosmic significance; Johannes Ockeghem's death inspired a wave of musical and poetic déplorations from poets and composers including Josquin des Prez and Guillaume Crétin, showing how the genre could produce extraordinary responses to the loss of a beloved cultural figure; A student composing a déploration might mourn the death of a cultural institution, a library, a jazz club, or a literary review, using the genre's conventions of collective lamentation to reflect on what is lost when cultural spaces disappear; The déploration's characteristic device of the ubi sunt question, where are the great ones now?, links it to the ballade tradition and the Romantic meditation on time, suggesting that lamentation for the dead inevitably becomes meditation on mortality itself; Christine de Pizan's déplorations mourning her husband show how the genre accommodated the private grief of a woman writer within its public, ceremonial conventions, creating a space where personal loss and social performance could coexist.
Additional Notes
Déploration is often occasional poetry, written in response to a specific death, especially that of a notable public or cultural figure. Renaissance literary culture used such poems to combine grief, praise, and communal memory. Students should compare déploration with élégie, planctus, and epitaph, noting differences in intended audience and ceremonial function. Because these poems are historically situated, they can also reveal political allegiance, patronage networks, and literary conventions surrounding public mourning.
Also Known As
Lamentation
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