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



fortunae filius

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

A son of fortune; a favorite of fate, someone especially blessed or lucky by circumstance.

Detailed Definition
Fortunae filius, from Horace, describes someone born under a lucky star, seemingly blessed by Fortune herself. In poetry, it appears in poems of congratulation, in meditations on luck and fate, and in satirical verse where the apparently fortunate are revealed to be merely lucky rather than virtuous. It connects to the tradition of personified Fortune as a fickle goddess who lifts some and destroys others, and to the ancient debate about whether happiness depends on virtue or on chance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Horace used fortunae filius semi-ironically in his Satires — the man favored by Fortune is to be envied and perhaps also pitied, since Fortune is notoriously fickle; A student writing a poem about luck, privilege, and the uneven distribution of good fortune might use fortunae filius as a structuring concept — exploring the relationship between being born lucky and deserving what one has; The tradition of de casibus poetry — poems about the falls of princes — is organized around the reversal of fortunae filius into its opposite, the favorite becoming the victim of Fortune's wheel; Andrew Marvell's poem on Cromwell presents him as a fortunae filius of a peculiar, providential kind — the man whom fortune, or Providence, chose for the terrible work of the age; A poet writing a satirical portrait of inherited wealth or privilege might invoke fortunae filius with gentle irony — the son of Fortune who mistakes his luck for merit
Additional Notes
Fortunae filius is from Horace's Satires (II.vi.49), where Horace uses it partly in self-description — he was indeed a man of fortunate circumstance, lifted from humble origins to wealth, friendship with Maecenas, and literary fame by the workings of fortune and his own talents. Students should note the ambivalence of the phrase in Horace's usage: to be a son of Fortune is to be dependent on something outside oneself, and Horace is typically too philosophical to be comfortable with any dependence on external goods. The phrase connects to the broader theme of fortuna in Latin literature — the personified goddess Fortune who turns her wheel arbitrarily, raising some and casting down others — and to the Stoic argument that the truly wise person is independent of Fortune's gifts. Related terms include the rota Fortunae (Fortune's wheel), the de casibus tradition, and the philosophical concept of the summum bonum (highest good) as something that Fortune cannot give or take away.
Also Known As
son of fortune fortune's son child of fortune fortune's favorite
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