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

Ducat

Archaic Terms
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 gold or silver coin used across many European states, especially Venice and other trading powers.

Detailed Definition
The ducat was a widely trusted trade coin in medieval and early modern Europe, struck by Venice, Austria, and various Italian and German states. Its reliability made it a preferred unit in international commerce and dowries. In poetry and drama—particularly Renaissance works—“ducat” appears in tales of merchants, lovers, and exiles, symbolising both opportunity and the bind of debt. Poets use it to conjure bustling ports, gambling tables, or the glittering yet precarious world of mercantile wealth, where a handful of ducats can seal a fate or buy temporary security.
Example
Example in poetry:
He bowed for each ducat, his art chained to the purse-strings of princes; In Venice, a ducat could buy a night’s splendour or a lifetime’s regret; The contract was written in ink but sealed in ducats, as all such bargains are; Poets slide ducats across the page to show how music, love, and honour are bought.
Additional Notes
Ducat offers a bridge into the complex monetary world of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, especially Venice and other trading cities. Shakespeare and his contemporaries frequently use “ducat” in contexts of loans, dowries, and bonds, making it a natural choice in pastiche or intertextual work. In poetry the ducat can symbolise cosmopolitan trade, commercial risk, or the patronage networks that supported artists. It is particularly useful when you want a European, but non-English, currency with a strong literary pedigree. Teachers can draw attention to how ducats move in plots—who lends, who borrows, who defaults—to reveal social structures.
Also Known As
bezant
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