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

hawker

Historical Office
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 street vendor who travels from place to place selling goods, often calling out to attract customers

Detailed Definition
The hawker appears in poetry as a mobile voice of commerce and community connection. Historically linking rural and urban economies, hawkers sold everything from food to trinkets. In verse, they symbolize circulation, survival, and the oral culture of the street. Their cries—often rhythmic and melodic—lend themselves to poetic form, making them natural figures for exploring sound, memory, and the informal networks of daily life.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Wordsworth’s "The Prelude," the hawker’s pack brings news and goods to remote valleys; Victorian street cries rendered in verse celebrate hawkers’ melodic sales pitches; Charles Reade depicts hawkers as mobile entrepreneurs of rural trade; The hawker in Thomas Hood’s social sketches sells hope alongside trinkets; Hawkers appear in market-day poems as connectors of town and country; Their voices symbolize vanishing oral commerce in nostalgic verse.
Additional Notes
Hawkers traveled villages and streets selling goods with distinctive cries; unlike shopkeepers, they brought commerce to doorsteps—poetic hawkers evoke mobility, folk culture, or economic precarity; their voices contribute to the auditory landscape of historical poetry, especially in urban or market scenes.
Also Known As
peddler street vendor costermonger pedler
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