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 F

Fae

Dialect
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

A Scots preposition meaning "from," indicating origin or source; in poetry, it grounds speech in a specific dialect, emphasizing roots, departure, or derivation.

Detailed Definition
"Fae" is the Scots equivalent of "from," and its brevity and distinctive vowel make it a characteristic marker of dialect verse. It appears throughout Scots poetry to indicate provenance, cause, and relationship, and its use immediately establishes a vernacular register. In songs and ballads "fae" contributes to the musical flow, its single syllable fitting naturally into Scots rhythms. The word is also associated with "foe" in some contexts, giving it an occasional ambiguity that poets have exploited with pleasure.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Fae" means from; Burns frequently uses "fae" throughout his poetry; A poet might write: "He came fae the hills wi' nothing but hope / and a heart that had learned how tae cope." as an opening character line; "She hid fae the storm in the old stone byre — / fae wind and fae cold, she sought the fire." uses the word twice for rhythmic reinforcement; "Fae the cradle tae the grave we go / through all the weather, high and low." expresses life's span; "A word fae the wise is worth its weight — / dinnae wait until too late." uses the word proverbially; "Fae distant hills the echo came, / returning like an answered name." creates a sonic metaphor; "He walked away fae all he knew, / and found the world entirely new." uses departure as transformation
Additional Notes
Fae is one of those small but structurally important Scots prepositions that, like "tae" (to) and "wi" (with), signal Scots register without dramatic phonetic difference from their English counterparts. Its usefulness in verse is primarily prosodic: "fae" is a lighter, more vowel-forward sound than "from," and Scots poets use it to maintain the flow and music of a line. It also carries the weight of origin and belonging — "fae Ayrshire," "fae the north" — in a way that can be quietly significant in poems about place and identity. Students should note that preposition choice in Scots poetry is never trivial; it contributes to the sound-world and the cultural location of the poem.
Other Meanings of “Fae”
Also Known As
From Since Fea Fair Folk
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