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

Mense

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

Good sense, propriety, or decorum; the quality of knowing how to behave appropriately.

Detailed Definition
"Mense" is a word for social and moral intelligence — the capacity to behave with appropriate dignity and consideration for others. It is often used in negative constructions: someone who lacks "mense" is graceless, inconsiderate, or improperly behaved. In Scots poetry it appears as a social standard against which characters are measured, and it belongs to the tradition of moral observation that runs from the makars through Burns and beyond. The word's conciseness is itself a kind of "mense" — saying exactly what needs to be said without excess or inadequacy.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Mense" means good manners, propriety, common sense, or dignity; A poet might write: "She had the mense tae hold her tongue / when lesser folk would have begun." praises restraint as social intelligence; "A bit of mense would serve ye well — / the world responds tae those who tell / wi' grace and thought rather than shout." integrates the word into broader social advice; "He lacked the mense tae see he'd failed — / and laughed while others' faces paled." uses the word critically; "Mense is the gift that's seldom taught — / it must be lived and slowly sought." reflects on character formation; "The mense of the auld ways still applies — / care for others, then rise." distils the value to a precept
Additional Notes
Mense is a word for a quality that is difficult to name in English — that combination of good sense, propriety, and social grace that makes a person know instinctively how to behave well without being told. To have "mense" is to be socially intelligent in a deep, embodied way; to be "menseless" is to lack that basic situational awareness that makes civilised social life possible. In Scottish culture, where community relations were governed by unwritten codes of behaviour, mense was a genuine social virtue. For students, the word reflects the importance in Scots verse of the social, communal dimension — poetry is not merely about individual feeling but about how individuals conduct themselves in the company of others.
Also Known As
Decorum Good manners Propriety
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