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

Gulistan

Historical Location
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

Gulistan, meaning “rose garden” in Persian, is a poetic name for an idealized Persian garden, often associated with roses, nightingales, fragrance, and romantic beauty.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, “Gulistan” usually evokes the luxuriant, dreamlike gardens of Persian literary tradition rather than naming one exact historical site. The word comes from Persian gul (“rose” or “flower”) and -stan (“place” or “land”), meaning “place of roses.” It is also the title of Saadi’s famous thirteenth-century Persian work Gulistan (The Rose Garden), which helped make the term a rich cultural symbol of beauty, wisdom, love, and refined garden imagery.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Sharp’s “The White Peacock,” the speaker describes a scented, sunlit garden: “As though from the gardens Of Gulistan, Where the bulbul singeth Through a mist of roses A breath were borne” Here, “Gulistan” is not presented as a literal destination. Instead, it creates an exotic, idealized image of a Persian rose garden, from which a perfumed breeze seems to drift into the poem’s Mediterranean-like setting. The “bulbul,” or nightingale, singing among roses strengthens this traditional Persian association.
Additional Notes
Language and origin: “Gulistan” is commonly transliterated as Golestan in modern Persian. It combines gul, meaning “rose” or “flower,” with -stan, meaning “place” or “land.” Literary association: Persian poetry frequently pairs the rose with the bulbul, or nightingale. The rose may symbolize beauty, love, or an unattainable beloved, while the bird represents the passionate lover or poet. Saadi’s Gulistan: The best-known use of the name is Gulistan (1258), a celebrated Persian collection of stories, aphorisms, and verse by Saadi of Shiraz. Historical location category: Although Golestan is also the name of a modern province in northeastern Iran, the word in this poem refers chiefly to an imagined or literary Persian garden, not to that specific geographic region. Related terms: “Paradise garden,” “Persian garden,” “rose garden,” and “bulbul” are closely related images in Persian and Orientalist poetry.
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