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 L

Lacquered screen

Ceramics
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 lacquered screen is an Asian-inspired folding divider with glossy, painted surfaces often near ceramics.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, lacquered screens create intimate spaces. Poets reference them for exoticism and spatial poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
The lacquered screen — a folding screen of lacquered panels, often decorated with chinoiserie scenes — appears in poems about Georgian and Victorian interiors as a device for dividing space and creating intimacy; A poem about a drawing room might describe a lacquered screen separating the pianoforte from the card table: "behind the painted willows, the other conversation — the music and the betting occupying the same room without acknowledgment"; The lacquered screen's painted world — pagodas, bridges, figures in silks — appears in poems about the European imagination of China as a realm of order and serenity constructed from desire; Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" finds an analogue in the lacquered screen: art preserving a world that history has destroyed, the painted figures indifferent to the tragedy below; In a poem about illness, a lacquered screen placed around a sickbed separates the patient from the household's life: "the painted world faced outward — the sick one saw only the black back, the unpainted side"; A poem about a stately home's decline might describe the lacquered screen sold to a hotel lobby: "the chinoiserie figures now facing corporate furniture, the willows indifferent to the change."
Additional Notes
The lacquered screen, whether folding or fixed, imported from Japan and China or produced by European craftsmen in imitation, served multiple functions in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century interior: dividing space, excluding draughts, displaying decorative painting, and providing a backdrop for the arrangement of ceramics on adjacent surfaces. Japanese lacquer screens of the Namban and Rimpa traditions were among the most prized imported objects in European collections. In poetry, the lacquered screen represents the Orient as visual spectacle and decorative fantasy, a surface of images behind which the imagination projects itself.
Also Known As
folding panel decorative divider Oriental barrier
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