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

Farsala

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

City in Thessaly, site of Caesar’s decisive victory over Pompey in 48 BCE

Detailed Definition
Farsala (Pharsalus) marked the end of the Roman Republic. Lucan’s epic “Pharsalia” dramatizes the battle as a cosmic tragedy. Poets use Farsala to symbolize civil war’s horror, the death of liberty, and the moral ambiguity of victory—making it a central topos in political and historical verse on Rome’s fall from grace.
Example
Example in poetry:
A Roman historian inspires a lyric where Farsala (Pharsalus) is Caesar’s battlefield of fate; In a modern Greek poem, Farsala embodies Thessalian plains’ quiet endurance; A postwar verse uses Farsala to explore how battlefields become farmland; A minimalist lyric reduces Farsala to wheat field and buried sword; A historical meditation imagines Pompey’s ghost wandering Farsala’s streams.
Additional Notes
Farsala (Pharsalus) was the site of Caesar’s defeat of Pompey (48 BCE), a turning point in Roman history; Lucan’s Bellum Civile dramatizes it as a locus of republican tragedy—essential for studying how battlefields become moral landscapes in epic.
Also Known As
Pharsala
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