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

Haunting refrain

Device
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 recurring phrase that lingers hauntingly in the reader’s mind, often evoking ghosts, memory, or unresolved emotional echoes.

Detailed Definition
Haunting refrain: A repeated line or phrase imbued with emotional or psychological weight that lingers in the reader’s mind, often evolving in meaning with each recurrence to suggest obsession, memory, or unresolved trauma.
Example
Example in poetry:
Haunting refrain: “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore’” echoes despair through repetition; “Do not go gentle into that good night” recurs with escalating urgency; In “The Highwayman,” “The wind was a torrent of darkness” returns ominously; “Remember me” in Christina Rossetti’s elegy lingers like a ghost; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” uses refrain as unresolved question; Warsan Shire’s “nobody leaves home unless” haunts refugee narratives
Additional Notes
Refrain that creates haunting, obsessive effect through repetition. Recurs with emotional weight. Related: refrain types, repetition. Study: how haunting differs from merely repetitive.
Also Known As
Spectral refrain Ghostly chorus Echoing burden Persistent repetend resonant recurrence
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