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

Meadowlark

Birds
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 grassland songbird with a bright yellow breast and flute-like song.

Detailed Definition
Meadowlarks symbolize rural tranquility, hope, and the vanishing prairie in poetry. Their clear, whistled songs evoke pastoral ideals and agricultural heritage. As grassland habitats shrink, they become emblems of ecological loss and cultural memory. Poets use meadowlarks to mourn disappearing landscapes, celebrate simple beauty, or anchor verses in the sensory richness of open country—wind, grass, and birdsong blending into a vanishing idyll.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the meadowlark’s song offers consolation amid national grief; Poets use the meadowlark’s flute-like notes to evoke the acoustic soul of vanishing prairies; In regional verse, the western meadowlark’s song defines the soundscape of open country and agricultural heritage; Ecopoets mourn grassland loss by referencing the meadowlark’s decline, turning its song into an elegy; Its bright yellow breast against green fields inspires color imagery in pastoral poetry; The meadowlark’s ground-nesting habits symbolize vulnerability and connection to soil and season.
Additional Notes
Meadowlark: Though not a true lark, meadowlarks (eastern and western) are grassland songsters with flute-like calls. They symbolize open spaces, rural America, and vanishing prairies. Their bright yellow breasts contrast with habitat loss—making them poignant emblems of ecological change and pastoral memory.
Also Known As
Eastern Meadowlark Western Meadowlark
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