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



Dresden

Battles
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

An 1813 Napoleonic victory in Saxony during the War of the Sixth Coalition.

Detailed Definition
Dresden was Napoleon’s last major victory before his downfall. In poetry, it appears as a final flash of brilliance before collapse—often used in Romantic and historical verse to explore the tragic arc of genius, the illusion of control, and the fleeting nature of power amid shifting alliances and overwhelming odds.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dresden, Napoleon’s 1813 victory, appears in German poetry as fleeting before Leipzig’s doom; A modern sonnet might frame Dresden’s baroque beauty amid cannon smoke; In a dramatic lyric, a Saxon conscript questions fighting for France at Dresden; A free-verse elegy could mourn the coalition dead in Saxony’s capital; Contemporary poets use Dresden to explore the irony of winning battles but losing wars; A haiku might capture snow falling on Dresden after the guns cease.
Additional Notes
Dresden (1813) was Napoleon’s last major victory before Leipzig; its fleeting success appears in Napoleonic-era poetry as a final blaze of glory before inevitable decline, often contrasted with the “Battle of Nations” that followed.
Also Known As
Battle of Dresden
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