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

Mania

Mythology
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

Roman goddess of the dead, spirits, and chaos, mother of the Lares and Lemures

Detailed Definition
Mania is a chthonic deity associated with the underworld and ancestral spirits, feared as a bringer of madness and death. She appears in early Roman religion as a primal force of disorder. Though rarely featured in canonical poetry, she surfaces in antiquarian or horror-inflected verse as a symbol of ancestral dread, psychological disintegration, or the raw power of the unseen world.
Example
Example in poetry:
Mania, goddess of the dead and madness, appears in Varro as mother of ghosts (Lemures); In Roman curse tablets, Mania is invoked to send nightmares; Ovid alludes to her in Fasti as “ancient terror of crossroads”; She is linked to the Lares and ancestral spirits in domestic rites; In tragic poetry, Mania represents the fury of the wronged dead; Inscriptions from Lavinium honor Mania as protector of infants’ souls.
Additional Notes
Mania is an ancient Roman goddess of the dead, madness, and the underworld; mother of ghosts (Lemures) and possibly Lares; mentioned by Varro and in curse tablets; symbolizes ancestral spirits and psychological terror; useful in horror or ancestral poetry; students should connect her to the Feralia festival and note her chthonic nature; she represents the dark, irrational forces beneath domestic order; later conflated with Greek Maniae (spirits of madness).
Also Known As
Mother of Ghosts Fury of Madness Chthonic Mania Spirit of the Underworld Hysteria Madness
Skip to main content