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

Erythrae

Historical Location
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 ancient Ionian city in Lydia, home to a famous oracle of Apollo

Detailed Definition
Erythrae’s oracle rivaled Delphi in antiquity, with its priestess (the Erythraean Sibyl) later incorporated into Roman and Christian prophecy. In poetry, Erythrae symbolizes alternative sources of divine knowledge and the diffusion of oracular power beyond Delphi. Its sibyl appears in Virgil and later Christian allegory, making the city a poetic nexus of pagan foresight and messianic expectation—ideal for apocalyptic or transitional themes.
Example
Example in poetry:
Erythrae; In Strabo, Erythrae is the Ionian city famed for its oracle, whose priestess spoke in riddles that even the gods could not unravel; Erythrae; A 17th-century lyric reads, “Erythrae—where the oracle’s voice was not divine, but a mirror to the soul’s deepest fear”; Erythrae; In a modern poem, “Erythrae: the place where the answer was always hidden in the question”; Erythrae; A student poem writes: “I asked the oracle of Erythrae—and she asked me, ‘What do you fear to hear?’”; Erythrae; The poet writes, “Erythrae does not give prophecy—it gives self-knowledge, wrapped in riddles”; Erythrae; “They called it Erythrae, but I call it the temple where the soul meets its own echo.”
Additional Notes
Erythrae, with its oracle of Apollo, serves as a poetic counterpart to Delphi; its lesser-known status allows poets to explore alternative voices, hidden prophecies, or the ambiguity of divine communication, making it ideal for works that question the authority of oracles or the reliability of sacred truth
Also Known As
Erythrai
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