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 H

Hag Witch

Folklore
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

An old woman associated with dark magic, often depicted as ugly and fearsome, but possessing deep ancestral knowledge and power.

Detailed Definition
Hag Witches in poetry reclaim the crone as wise, not monstrous. They appear in feminist and mythic verse as the keepers of forgotten rites, where age is not decay but depth, and ugliness is the armor of those who refuse to be erased.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Burns’ “Tam o’ Shanter,” the hag witch rides a broomstick: “Auld Nick, the witch, and all her crew”; in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the weird sisters are hag witches with “choppy fingers” and “skinny lips”; in Keats’ “Lamia,” the hag witch of the marsh is the mother of all deception; in Coleridge’s “Christabel,” the hag witch is the shadow beneath the door; in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (poetically rendered), the hag witch haunts the moors as Catherine’s spirit; in Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” the hag witch is winter’s skeletal hand upon the land.
Additional Notes
Hag Witch is an old woman associated with dark magic, often depicted as ugly and fearsome, yet possessing deep ancestral knowledge, herbal wisdom, and prophetic sight. In folklore, she is the crone of the triple goddess—wise, feared, and marginalized. In poetry, she challenges ageist tropes, embodying resilience, hidden power, and the dignity of the discarded. Poets reclaim her as a symbol of matriarchal authority, ecological knowledge, and the truth that wisdom wears no face of youth.
Also Known As
Hag Old Crone
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