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

Ennui

Psychology
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

Listless boredom and dissatisfaction arising from lack of interest or meaning.

Detailed Definition
Ennui is the hallmark of existential weariness, often found in decadent or modern poetry. It manifests through flat tones, stalled action, and images of emptiness or repetition. Poets like Baudelaire or Eliot use ennui to diagnose cultural malaise and spiritual aridity. It becomes a lens for critiquing luxury, routine, or failed idealism, and its suffocating weight often provokes desperate gestures or ironic detachment.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ennui in Sylvia Plath's sonnet "Ennui" explores sophisticated hopelessness; Charles Baudelaire's "Spleen 2" describes ennui swelling into immortality; Luis G. Dato's "Ennui" speaks of forgetting care in the wilderness of cities; Paul Verlaine's "Apathy" portrays ennui in a golden, languid style; The poem "L'Homme de l'Ennui" expresses forlorn wandering; Plath wrote "L'ennui" beside a passage in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Additional Notes
Ennui is the hallmark of existential weariness, often found in decadent or modern poetry, manifesting through flat tones, stalled action, and images of emptiness or repetition. Poets like Baudelaire or Eliot use ennui to diagnose cultural malaise and spiritual aridity. In teaching, distinguish ennui from boredom: ennui carries a more refined, listless dissatisfaction linked to privilege or decadence, while boredom is more mundane. Ennui often provokes desperate gestures or ironic detachment, making it a rich term for analyzing modernist and symbolist poetry. Students should examine how poets convey ennui through languid rhythms and sparse imagery.
Also Known As
Boredom lethargy tedium apathy listlessness
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