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

Dulcinea

Literary Character
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

The imagined beloved whom Don Quixote elevates into a perfect lady.

Detailed Definition
Dulcinea is the idealized lady of Don Quixote’s devotion, though she scarcely appears as an active character in Cervantes’ novel. In ordinary life she is associated with Aldonza Lorenzo, but the knight transforms her through language into a noble princess worthy of heroic service. This distance between woman and imagined ideal makes Dulcinea a revealing figure of poetic invention. She represents the beloved as projection, muse, absent presence, and sustaining fiction.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Don Quixote, Dulcinea is an idealized beloved whose imagined perfection inspires the knight's adventures; A poet may use Dulcinea as a name for an unattainable love shaped more by fantasy than by knowledge; A poem can contrast a real, ordinary person with the exalted image a speaker calls Dulcinea; Invoking Dulcinea may suggest how desire transforms a distant beloved into a private symbol of beauty
Additional Notes
Dulcinea is the imagined lady whom Don Quixote worships, although she is based on an ordinary village woman named Aldonza Lorenzo. She functions more as an ideal created by imagination than as an active character. In literary discussion, “Dulcinea” can refer to an unattainable beloved or a person transformed by idealization. The name also highlights the contrast between romantic fantasy and everyday reality.
Also Known As
Dulcinea del Toboso Aldonza Lorenzo
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