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

Exhaustion

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

Extreme physical or mental fatigue resulting from prolonged effort or stress; in poetry, exhaustion becomes a metaphor for spiritual depletion, despair, or the limits of human endurance, often depicted through languid imagery.

Detailed Definition
Exhaustion in poetry appears through sluggish rhythm, sparse language, and imagery of weight or dissolution. It captures burnout, grief, or the aftermath of struggle. Poets use exhaustion to depict wartime weariness, depressive episodes, or the toll of creativity. It invites readers into states of vulnerability and surrender, often preceding renewal or collapse, and challenges heroic narratives with quiet, unglamorous endurance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Exhaustion in Lord Byron's "So We'll Go No More a Roving" captures quiet emotional exhaustion; Joy Harjo's "All the Tired Horses in the Sun" expresses indigenous existential exhaustion; Eva Gore-Booth's "Weariness" describes a woman exhausted by the loud world; D.H. Lawrence's "Last Lesson of the Afternoon" contemplates emotional and physical exhaustion; Najwan Darwish's poetry portrays exhaustion as a byproduct of intergenerational crimes; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Broken Oar" shows fatigue through the inscription on an oar.
Additional Notes
Exhaustion in poetry appears through sluggish rhythm, sparse language, and imagery of weight or dissolution, capturing burnout, grief, or the aftermath of struggle. Poets use exhaustion to depict wartime weariness, depressive episodes, or the toll of creativity. In teaching, distinguish exhaustion from fatigue: exhaustion is a more extreme depletion, while fatigue is progressive weariness. Exhaustion invites readers into states of vulnerability and surrender, often preceding renewal or collapse. Students should analyze how poets use enjambment, caesura, and imagery of sinking or fading to convey exhaustion's physical and emotional weight.
Other Meanings of “Exhaustion”
Also Known As
Fatigue depletion burnout weariness collapse
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