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 G

Grief

Life And Death
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

Deep sorrow caused by death or profound loss. It is a central emotional subject of elegiac poetry.

Detailed Definition
Grief is the changing and often disruptive response to the death of a loved one or to another irreparable loss. In poetry, it may appear as tears, numbness, anger, longing, guilt, ritual, or an inability to speak. Poets frequently resist presenting grief as a simple progression toward recovery, instead showing its returns, contradictions, and physical force. A grief poem can preserve the dead while recording how loss alters the survivor’s life.
Example
Example in poetry:
W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" turns grief into a desire for the whole world to stop and acknowledge loss; In an elegy, grief may appear physically through sleeplessness, nausea, silence, or the inability to perform ordinary tasks; A poet can use repetition to convey grief's recurring force: "I reach for the phone, I reach for the phone"; Grief poems become more convincing when they balance large emotion with concrete details such as an empty chair or unworn shoes
Additional Notes
Grief is not a single, orderly emotion; poems may render it as numbness, anger, longing, disbelief, tenderness, or repetition. Look for fragmented form, silence, altered time, and recurring images in grief poems.
Other Meanings of “Grief”
Also Known As
Sorrow Bereavement Heartache
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