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 I

Innocence

Psychology
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 psychological state marked by purity, moral simplicity, and absence of guile or corruption, often contrasted with experience in poetic duality.

Detailed Definition
Innocence often symbolizes prelapsarian wholeness. Poetry laments its loss through pastoral elegy or childlike diction, using it as a lens to critique experience, knowledge, or societal decay.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” innocence is portrayed as pure and uncorrupted; In Sylvia Plath’s “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” innocence contrasts with emerging power; In Emily Dickinson’s “I never saw a Moor,” innocence trusts unseen truths; In Langston Hughes’ “Children’s Rhymes,” innocence is shattered by racial reality; In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” innocence is lost in captivity; In Ocean Vuong’s “Telemachus,” innocence blends with filial love and loss.
Additional Notes
Innocence—naïve purity—is often lost, not sustained, in poetry (Blake’s “Songs of Experience”); differs from ignorance by its moral quality; poets use pastoral imagery, child speakers, or simple diction; students should analyze who gets to be innocent—and who doesn’t; note its political use: innocence can justify protection or erase complexity.
Also Known As
Naïveté Guilelessness Purity Artlessness virginity
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