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

Fear

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

A fundamental emotional and physiological response to real or imagined threat, often manifesting in poetry through imagery of danger, flight, or paralysis.

Detailed Definition
Fear triggers fight-or-flight and shapes behavior. Poetry renders it through ominous imagery, abrupt line breaks, or sensory detail, exploring both primal terror and existential dread—of death, abandonment, or the unknown.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” fear manifests as terror of patriarchal authority; In Emily Dickinson’s “‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,” fear is oceanic and consuming; In W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” fear is ignored in the background of suffering; In Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred,” fear simmers beneath the question “Or does it explode?”; In Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” fear chokes soldiers in gas masks; In Warsan Shire’s “Home,” fear drives flight from war-torn lands.
Additional Notes
Fear—a primal response to threat—ranges from phobic to existential in poetry; unlike anxiety, it has a (real or imagined) object; poets use visceral imagery, fragmented syntax, or sensory detail to evoke it; students should analyze how fear is gendered, racialized, or politicized (e.g., Shire’s refugee poems); note its creative potential: fear can sharpen perception or reveal vulnerability.
Also Known As
Terror Dread Apprehension Panic Fright Horror Trepidation
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