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

merchant

Historical Office
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 trader or businessperson engaged in commerce, often across long distances

Detailed Definition
The merchant appears in poetry as a figure of enterprise, risk, and cultural exchange. Historically vital to urban economies and global networks, merchants bridged worlds through goods and capital. In verse—from Chaucer to Elizabethan drama—they symbolize ambition, cosmopolitanism, or moral ambiguity. Poets use merchants to explore themes of wealth, trust, and the human cost of profit, often contrasting commercial values with spiritual or communal ideals.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales," the merchant navigates trade with shrewd optimism; Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice" explores merchant ethics and risk; Victorian poets depict merchants as engines of empire and inequality; The merchant in Thomas Hood’s verse calculates profit amid human cost; Merchants appear in port odes loading ships with global goods; Their ledgers symbolize both prosperity and moral debt.
Additional Notes
Merchants drove long-distance trade, forming powerful guilds and financing exploration—poetic merchants may symbolize greed, cosmopolitanism, or economic transformation; their global networks appear in Renaissance and Enlightenment verse as engines of change, luxury, or moral ambiguity.
Also Known As
trader tradesman pedler
Skip to main content