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

Lass

Dialect
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 girl or young woman; a term of affection and address central to Scots lyric tradition.

Detailed Definition
"Lass" is fundamental to the Scots lyric tradition, the counterpart to "lad" and the object of countless songs and love poems. Burns's lasses are real, embodied, spirited young women, celebrated for their beauty and character without idealization. The word carries warmth, familiarity, and respect, and it appears in contexts ranging from tender love lyric to rousing dance song. "Lass" is the vernacular alternative to "maiden" or "girl," grounding affection in everyday speech rather than literary convention.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Lass" means a young woman or girl; Burns writes "My Bonnie Lass" and "A man's a man for a' that" and addresses lasses throughout; A poet might write: "A bonnie lass walked doun the lane, / her laughter lighter than the rain." for a lyric portrait; "She was her father's darling lass / until the years began tae pass." shows time's transformation; "The lass grew up and faced the day / wi' steady heart and words tae say." celebrates a young woman's maturity; "Lang may ye run, my bonnie lass — / the world grows better as ye pass." offers a blessing; "A lass can be a universe — / containing tides, and joy, and worse." elevates the term beyond diminutive
Additional Notes
Lass is one of the cornerstones of Scots lyric tradition, the female half of the "lad and lass" pairing that structures so many songs and poems of love and courtship. Its range runs from the very young (a child) to the unmarried young woman, and it carries associations of freshness, potential, and the kind of beauty that belongs specifically to youth and country life. In Burns, the "lass" is not merely an object of desire but an agent — capable of wit, warmth, cruelty, and tenderness. Students should note how Burns's lasses differ from the passive beloveds of much conventional love poetry: they speak, choose, and act. Compare with "quean" (girl, also sometimes used pejoratively) for a related but distinct term.
Also Known As
Girl Young woman Lassie wench
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