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

Gulliver

Literary Character
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

The fictional surgeon and traveler in Swift’s satirical "Gulliver’s Travels," whose journeys critique human nature and societal norms.

Detailed Definition
Gulliver visits fantastical lands that satirize human nature, politics, and society. In poetry, he represents the critical observer, the relativity of perspective, and the absurdity of human pretensions.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Jonathan Swift’s "Gulliver’s Travels" (rendered poetically by later poets), Gulliver symbolizes rational man confronting absurdity; In W.H. Auden’s “The Quest,” Gulliver represents disillusioned Enlightenment traveler; In T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Gulliver’s voyages echo fragmented modern experience; In modern satire, Gulliver often signifies the alienated observer; In Derek Walcott’s “Omeros,” Gulliver’s scale shifts mirror postcolonial perspective; In Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars,” Gulliver’s tiny Lilliputians reflect cosmic humility.
Additional Notes
Gulliver, from Swift’s satirical travels, represents the limits of reason, cultural relativism, and human folly; poets reference him to critique societal norms, explore scale and perspective, or examine the traveler as alienated observer—his encounters with Houyhnhnms and Yahoos inform poems about rationality versus animality and the fragility of civilization.
Also Known As
Voyager of Lilliput Satirical Traveler Lemuel the Observer
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