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.

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

flumen orationis

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

The river of speech; the flowing, continuous stream of eloquent discourse.

Detailed Definition
Flumen orationis, from Cicero, describes the ideal of continuous, flowing, abundant eloquence as a great river. In poetry, it is a metaphor for the sustained, generative flow of creative language. Poets invoke it to describe the ideal of poetic abundance and fluency, the capacity to sustain a high level of eloquence across a long poem. It also connects to water imagery more broadly, the river as a figure for time, memory, and the continuous flow of the literary tradition from source to sea.
Example
Example in poetry:
Cicero's ideal of flumen orationis — the great river of eloquent speech — was the standard against which Renaissance humanist poets measured themselves; Spenser's Faerie Queene has the quality of flumen orationis — an enormous, sustained flow of verse that carries the reader along through its sheer abundance and continuity; Milton's Paradise Lost is often praised in terms of flumen orationis — the great Miltonic sentence flowing for many lines, carrying complex subordinate clauses in its current; A student might analyze the difference between the flumen orationis style — abundant, continuous, carrying the reader forward — and the compressed, elliptical style that breaks off and demands the reader supply the missing connections; Whitman's catalogues embody flumen orationis in a democratic key — the endless enumeration of America's people, places, and experiences as a great flowing river of verbal abundance
Additional Notes
Flumen orationis is from Cicero's Brutus (274), where it describes the style of the orator Caelius as having an abundant and flowing river of speech. Students should note that the river metaphor for discourse implies several things simultaneously: abundance (the river is full), continuity (it flows without breaks), power (it can carry things along), and directionality (it flows toward a destination). These qualities are all rhetorical ideals — the speech or poem that is full, continuous, powerful, and purposeful. The phrase should be contrasted with the style described as laconic (from the Spartans, who were famous for brief, pithy speech) and with the compressed, elliptical styles of Tacitus, Hopkins, and Celan. Related terms include the genera dicendi (the three styles of speaking: high, middle, and plain), abundantia (verbal copiousness), and Cicero's concept of the perfect orator as one who can command all three styles.
Also Known As
river of speech flow of eloquence stream of speech
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