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

Humble pie

Idiomatic Phrase
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 idiomatic phrase meaning to make a humiliating apology or accept deserved shame; culinary metaphor derived from historical dish served to offenders, used in poetry to convey contrition, degradation, or forced humility through gustatory symbolism.

Detailed Definition
Humble pie means humiliation, apology, or the painful acceptance that one was wrong. To “eat humble pie” is to swallow pride. In poetry, the idiom is rich because it makes moral correction into a meal, joining shame, appetite, and social ritual. It can appear in comic reversal, repentance, satire, or confession. A boastful speaker may be forced to eat humble pie after defeat. The phrase is useful for exploring pride, public embarrassment, forgiveness, and the bodily discomfort of admitting error.
Example
Example in poetry:
In a moral poem, the boastful singer eats humble pie after the quiet child wins the song contest; A satire might force the vain lord to taste humble pie before his servants; The phrase humble pie suggests being made to admit one's error; A poet can use it to turn pride into comedy or repentance.
Additional Notes
Humble pie means a humiliating apology or admission of error. Historically, the phrase is often connected with umble pie, made from the offal of deer, though modern usage focuses on humility. In poetry, it can be comic, satirical, or morally serious. It turns pride into something eaten, like eat one’s words. Students should observe how food imagery makes apology bodily, social, and sometimes bitterly theatrical.
Also Known As
admit mistake
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