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

Io

Mythology
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

Argive priestess loved by Zeus who was transformed into a white heifer to hide the affair from Hera. Tormented by a gadfly sent by Hera, she wandered the earth until restored to human form.

Detailed Definition
Io was turned into a cow by Zeus to hide her from Hera, but Hera sent a gadfly to torment her. After wandering the world, she reached Egypt and was restored, becoming ancestor of Heracles. Poets use Io to explore themes of identity loss, persecution, and eventual redemption through endurance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Io, transformed into a heifer by Zeus to hide her from Hera, wanders in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound; In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, her journey ends in Egypt as Isis; Virgil alludes to Io’s suffering in Georgics; Hesiod names Io as an ancestor of heroes in mythic genealogies; Renaissance poets use Io to symbolize persecuted innocence; Modern feminist verse reclaims Io as a survivor of divine violation.
Additional Notes
Io, priestess of Hera transformed into a heifer by Zeus to hide her, endured Hera’s torment until restored in Egypt as Isis; her wanderings symbolize exile and identity loss—Ovid and Aeschylus dramatize her suffering—ideal for poetry on displacement, surveillance, or cross-cultural syncretism.
Also Known As
Horned Maiden Wanderer of Hera’s Wrath Heifer of Argos
Skip to main content