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.

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

Leave no stone unturned

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

To try every possible means or method; to make a complete and exhaustive effort in pursuit of a goal.

Detailed Definition
Attributed to the Oracle of Delphi advising Polycrates to search for Mardonius's treasure, this idiom celebrates thoroughness, persistence, and the refusal to accept incomplete knowledge. In poetry, it appears as a metaphor for the creative and critical labor that leaves nothing unexplored—the poet or scholar who insists on going everywhere language can take them. Poets also invoke it in elegies and works of justice, honoring those who refused to stop searching—for the missing, the truth, the adequate word. Its archaeological imagery—stones overturned to reveal what is hidden—suits poems about discovery, excavation, and the recovery of what has been suppressed, buried, or forgotten beneath the official surface of history.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about archival research might celebrate leave no stone unturned as both a practical description of the scholar's method and a metaphor for the ethical obligation to recover what has been buried; In an elegy for a missing person — the search that went everywhere, turned everything, refused to accept incompleteness — leave no stone unturned honors the love that organized itself as exhaustive, methodical attention; A poem about creative research — the writer who reads everything, travels every road, interviews everyone who might have known something — might use the phrase to describe the particular form of obsessive thoroughness that serious art requires; In a political poem about accountability, leave no stone unturned is the prosecutor's creed — the refusal to accept the incomplete investigation that allows the powerful to evade what justice requires; A poem about historical recovery — the excavation of suppressed voices, the recovery of what was deliberately buried — might use the Delphic origin of the phrase to connect contemporary archival work to the ancient injunction to search everywhere for what is hidden; The phrase suits poems about the relationship between love and attention, asking whether to leave no stone unturned in pursuit of another person is the deepest form of care or, in some circumstances, the most refined form of violation
Additional Notes
This idiom suggests exhaustive effort. In poetry, it can be literalised through search imagery: lifting stones, combing fields, reading old letters, questioning witnesses, or excavating memory. It suits quests for truth, lost love, justice, or artistic form. The phrase implies persistence, thoroughness, and refusal to accept easy ignorance.
Also Known As
Try everything Exhaust all options No stone unturned
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