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 E

Empedocles

Historical Figure
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

Pre-Socratic philosopher who proposed four elements as cosmic roots.

Detailed Definition
Empedocles (c.490–430 BCE) blended mysticism and science, envisioning cosmic cycles of love and strife. In poetry, he represents the thinker-poet, a visionary whose ideas bridge philosophy and myth, reflecting humanity’s yearning for unity.
Example
Example in poetry:
Empedocles: Empedocles’ theory of elements as cosmic forces inspires poets to frame emotion as elemental: “He said love binds, and hate divides— / and so the soul is torn, and tries.”; His suicide into Etna becomes poetic metaphor for transcendence: “He leapt into the fire’s throat, / to prove the soul is not a note.”; Poets borrow his fusion of science and mysticism: “The earth, the air, the flame, the sea— / are not just elements, but we.”; His belief in reincarnation becomes verse: “I was the wind, I was the stone, / I was the scream, I was the moan.”; A poet might write, “Empedocles did not die—he chose / to merge with all he’d ever known.”; His legacy: “He did not seek to be divine— / he sought to be the world, and shine.”
Additional Notes
Empedocles’ theory of earth, air, fire, and water as cosmic roots provided a poetic framework for elemental symbolism in Western verse; his own poetic style, blending philosophy and myth, influenced Lucretius and later poets who used natural elements as metaphors for emotional and spiritual states, anchoring lyricism in physical cosmology.
Also Known As
Empedocles of Acragas
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