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

fatum

Latin Phrases
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

Fate; the power that pre-determines the course of events, beyond human control or appeal.

Detailed Definition
Fatum is the Latin word for fate, derived from fari, to speak, suggesting that fate is something spoken or decreed by the gods. In poetry, it is one of the most fundamental concepts, present throughout epic, tragic, and lyric verse. It raises questions about free will, divine purpose, and the meaning of human suffering. The fatalistic dimension of much classical poetry, particularly Virgilian epic, reflects a deep engagement with the idea that human lives are shaped by forces beyond their comprehension or control.
Example
Example in poetry:
Virgil's Aeneid is organized around fatum — Aeneas's destiny to found Rome is fixed from the beginning, and the entire epic is the story of how fate works through human suffering to its appointed end; The Stoic tradition of accepting fatum with equanimity shaped Seneca's tragedies and the verse they generated — the noble acceptance of what cannot be changed as the supreme human achievement; Thomas Hardy's poetry is saturated with fatum in a Stoic key — the immanent will that shapes things toward inevitable ends without purpose, justice, or awareness; A student writing about a moment of apparent inevitability — a diagnosis, a departure, an ending that was somehow always going to happen — might explore fatum as a way of giving that experience philosophical coherence; A.E. Housman's Shropshire Lad poems enact fatum through the figure of the young man born to die young — the brevity of life presented as a kind of cosmic appointment that cannot be questioned or evaded
Additional Notes
Fatum derives from the past participle of the Latin verb fari (to speak), so fatum literally means what has been spoken — fate as a divine pronouncement, a decree uttered by the gods before time began. Students should note this etymological connection between fate and speech: in the Latin worldview, what happens is what has been said, and the universe unfolds according to a prior verbal act of divine will. This gives fatum a connection to the concept of logos and to the poetic tradition of the vates (the prophet-poet who hears and speaks the divine decrees). The plural fata (fates) refers to the three Fates (Parcae in Latin, Moirai in Greek) who spin, measure, and cut the thread of human life — a mythological image central to the elegiac tradition. Related terms include necessitas (necessity), fortuna (fortune, which is fickle and changeable, unlike the fixed fatum), and the concept of providentia (divine foresight).
Also Known As
fate destiny doom the fates fata
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