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

Lilt

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 light, rhythmical quality in voice or movement; a pleasing musical cadence.

Detailed Definition
"Lilt" describes the particular musical quality of a voice or tune that rises and falls with natural grace, and it is itself a word with lilt. It appears in Scots poetry both as subject and quality, describing the music of speech, song, and landscape. Scottish verse is often praised for its lilt, the natural rhythm that comes from composing in or near the spoken vernacular. The word embodies an ideal of poetry as song, celebrating the moment when language becomes music without losing its meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Lilt" means a cheerful rhythm, a light melodious quality, or to sing with it; A poet might write: "Her voice had sic a bonnie lilt — / it covered sorrow without guilt." uses the word to characterise voice; "The pipe tune had a lilt that stayed / within the ear for days and days." describes musical persistence; "He walked wi' a lilt in his step that spring — / as if his feet had learned tae sing." applies the term to movement; "A lilt in the language, gentle, clear — / that's how ye know the Scots are near." celebrates linguistic musicality; "The lilt of the burn on the stony bed / was all the lullaby they needed said." uses natural sound as music
Additional Notes
Lilt is one of the most musical words in Scots, and its presence in a poem is almost always a signal about sound and rhythm. A "lilting" voice or tune has that particular quality of light, bouncing musicality that characterises much Scots folk music — the pentatonic scales, the dance rhythms, the way melody seems to lift and float. In verse, "lilt" can describe either the sound of song or the movement quality that sound creates in the listener. For students studying the oral and musical dimensions of Scottish poetry — the connection between lyric verse and song tradition — "lilt" is a key term. It also appears in the characterisation of speech: a speaker with a "lilt" has music in their voice.
Also Known As
Tune Song Rhythm lilting
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