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

Gull

Birds
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 common seabird known for its scavenging habits and loud, plaintive calls.

Detailed Definition
Gulls symbolize freedom, adaptability, and the liminal space between land and sea in poetry. Often portrayed as both majestic and opportunistic, they embody contradictions—grace and grit, beauty and nuisance. In maritime verse, gulls serve as omens, companions, or witnesses to human folly. Poets use them to explore themes of transience, urban-wild interfaces, and the haunting cries that echo over harbors, beaches, and memory.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the gull’s cry over the sea becomes a primal song of loss and longing; Poets use gulls to symbolize the liminal space between land and sea, civilization and wilderness; In urban poetry, seagulls scavenging city streets represent adaptability and the blurring of natural/artificial boundaries; The gull’s white wings against storm clouds evoke hope or divine presence in romantic verse; In maritime elegies, gulls circle ships as witnesses to human ambition and folly; Ecopoets critique gull population booms linked to human waste, exploring unintended consequences of progress.
Additional Notes
Gull: Gulls are complex symbols—freedom and the sea, but also scavenging and urban intrusion. Poets like Sylvia Plath used gulls to convey emotional distance or existential isolation. Their varied cries and adaptability make them versatile; avoid cliché by specifying species (e.g., herring gull vs. kittiwake) and context (coastal vs. inland).
Also Known As
Herring Gull Ring-billed Gull Black-backed Gull Sea Gull (colloquial) Seagull gudgeon simpleton Fat–cull
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