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 M

Maist

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

Most; the Scots superlative, used to indicate the greatest degree or largest part.

Detailed Definition
"Maist" is the Scots equivalent of "most," and its phonological difference from English marks it as a dialect word with centuries of use in verse and speech. It appears throughout the tradition in superlatives of praise and condemnation, in the "maist" beautiful and "maist" foolish alike, and its brevity makes it metrically convenient. In democratic Scots verse it appears in observations about what matters maist — character over status, generosity over wealth — and it carries the quiet authority of the superlative degree in a culture that prizes understatement.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Maist" means most or almost; A poet might write: "Maist days she walked tae meet the sun — / her ritual before the day begun." for a habitual action; "He was maist like his father in his pride — / a mirror wi' the edges tied." draws a character comparison; "Maist of love is shown in small things done — / the cup of tea, the battle won." praises quiet devotion; "Maist of all I miss the voice — / the rest is grief without a choice." focuses loss on a specific detail; "The maist important door ye'll knock / is the one that has nae outer lock." offers proverbial wisdom
Additional Notes
Maist functions as both superlative adjective and adverb in Scots, and its flexibility makes it among the most frequently used degree words in verse. "Maist fair," "maist dear," "maist like to break my heart" — the superlative is the natural mode of lyric intensification, and "maist" performs this function with Scots authority. For students, noting when a poet reaches for "maist" rather than its English equivalent reveals the degree of Scots commitment in a given work. It also appears in the fixed phrase "the maist feck" (the greater part, the majority), which students of Burns and his contemporaries will encounter regularly. Maist is, in short, among the maist useful words to know.
Also Known As
Most Chiefly
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