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.

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 E

Elephant in the room

Idiomatic Phrase
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 obvious problem or issue that everyone ignores or avoids discussing.

Detailed Definition
Though modern (20th century), this idiom powerfully captures collective denial. In poetry, it manifests as unspoken grief, taboo, or political silence—central to works on trauma, racism, or family secrets. Poets like Claudia Rankine use spatial metaphor to render absence palpable. The elephant’s size versus invisibility creates surreal tension, ideal for imagistic or fragmented verse. Its psychological acuity makes it indispensable in contemporary poems dissecting complicity, where what’s unsaid shapes relationships more than dialogue.
Example
Example in poetry:
Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” renders racism as the elephant in the room during polite gatherings; A family poem: “Grandma’s dementia—an elephant in the room we dust around”; In political verse: “Climate collapse: the elephant in the room at every economic summit”; Dinner party satire: “We discussed wine vintages while the elephant in the room starved”.
Additional Notes
Though modern (20th century), this idiom powerfully captures collective denial. In poetry, it manifests as unspoken grief, taboo, or political silence—central to Rankine’s “Citizen” or family elegies. The elephant’s size versus invisibility creates surreal tension, ideal for imagistic verse. Students should analyze how poets render absence palpable, using spatial metaphor to explore complicity: what’s unsaid often shapes relationships more than dialogue, making this idiom indispensable in contemporary poems dissecting silence as social performance.
Also Known As
Obvious problem no one mentions
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