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

Grumphie

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

A pig; the Scots affectionate or humorous term for a pig or sow.

Detailed Definition
"Grumphie" is a delightfully expressive and onomatopoeic Scots word for a pig, its sound capturing the grunting, snuffling quality of the animal. Burns uses it in "Halloween" and other poems of rural life, and it contributes to the democratic, earthy texture of his verse, where farm animals are named with the same attention as people. The word's humorous quality — that slightly dismissive suffix — is nevertheless affectionate, and in Scots poetry the pig is a legitimate presence in the agricultural world the tradition celebrates and observes without sentimentality.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Grumphie" is a colloquial name for a pig, also used affectionately; Burns uses "grumphie" in "The Twa Dogs"; A poet might write: "The grumphie rooted in the mire, / content below the August fire." for a pastoral character; "Fat as a grumphie, warm wi' luck, / he sat and ate and cared nae truck." uses the term for comic comparison; "The wee grumphie by the byre door / asked nothing more of life, nor more." celebrates simple contentment; "As wise as grumphie in the mud — / she kept her pleasures understood." uses the animal humorously; "The grumphie grunted at the gate, / indifferent tae all love and fate." applies animal stoicism comically
Additional Notes
Grumphie is a delightful example of Scots affectionate anthropomorphisation — the pig given a personality through its name alone, the "grumph" (grunt) built into the word's very sound. Burns uses "grumphie" in "The Auld Farmer's New-Year Morning Salutation to His Auld Mare, Maggie" and other farm poems where animals are addressed as participants in communal life rather than mere livestock. In the tradition of Burns's animal poems, the grumphie is not a symbol or an abstraction but a specific, recognisable creature. For students studying Burns's pastoral and animal verse, this kind of affectionately named beast reveals the poet's democratic respect for non-human life.
Also Known As
Pig Piglet Swine
Skip to main content