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

Harmonium

Musical Instrument
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 reed keyboard instrument powered by foot-operated bellows, common in South Asian and Western sacred music

Detailed Definition
The harmonium appears in poetry as a bridge between sacred and secular, East and West; its sustained chords support devotional song and domestic music-making, symbolizing spiritual longing, colonial encounter, and the quiet persistence of faith in lyrical and diasporic verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Victorian verse, the harmonium’s wheeze accompanies hymns in parlors: “Its bellows sighed like a saint with consumption”; The harmonium’s reedy hymn trembles through chapel rafters, stitching prayer to timber; “She pumped the harmonium with blistered hands, each chord a plea against the storm”; Poets contrast the harmonium’s domestic piety with wilder instruments: “While drums called war, the harmonium whispered peace.”
Additional Notes
The harmonium is a reed-based keyboard instrument pumped by foot or hand bellows, common in Indian classical, devotional, and Western parlour music; its sustained, organ-like chords support vocal lines—poets can reference it to evoke domestic piety, colonial cultural exchange, or the fusion of Eastern and Western sacred soundscapes in postcolonial verse.
Also Known As
Pump organ reed organ
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