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

fonn

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

The Irish word for a tune, melody, or air, and also for desire or longing, a productive ambiguity that allows poets to move between musical and emotional registers in a single term.

Detailed Definition
Fonn's double meaning — melody and desire — makes it one of the most poetically suggestive words in Irish. A poet can invoke fonn to mean the tune to which a song is sung and simultaneously the longing that inspires it, collapsing the distinction between musical form and emotional content. This ambiguity mirrors a broader Irish cultural tendency to see music and feeling as inseparable. In the song-poem tradition, the fonn (air) to which verses were sung was as much a part of the composition as the words themselves, and many Irish poems were written to pre-existing airs that carried their own emotional associations.
Example
Example in poetry:
The fonn provides the melodic foundation for sung poetry; Poets compose verses to fit specific fonn patterns and rhythms; The fonn carries emotional tone that complements lyrical content; Learning traditional fonn requires attentive listening and imitation; The fonn connects contemporary performers with centuries of musical tradition; Innovation within fonn structures keeps traditional forms relevant to new audiences.
Additional Notes
Fonn means both tune/melody and desire/longing, a productive ambiguity in Irish poetry. This dual meaning allows poets to link musical expression with emotional intensity. A poem without fonn is considered lifeless, lacking both rhythm and passion. Poets play on this connection to suggest that true art arises from deep feeling. Understanding fonn helps appreciate the integral relationship between sound and sense in Irish verse. It emphasizes that poetry is not just text but embodied performance and emotion.
Also Known As
tune melody air desire longing inclination
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