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

Meris

Literary Character
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

An older shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues, often representing dispossession and the loss of pastoral security in changing times.

Detailed Definition
Meris appears in Virgil's Ninth Eclogue as an aged shepherd displaced from his land, his character embodying the intrusion of historical violence into pastoral peace. The character represents the vulnerability of rural life to political upheaval, his memories of lost lands and dead poets (like Menalcas) creating elegiac undertones. Meris enriches pastoral poetry by introducing age, loss, and political consciousness, his presence acknowledging that Arcadia exists in history and remains subject to forces beyond shepherds' control.
Example
Example in poetry:
Meris appears in Virgil's Ninth Eclogue as an older shepherd who remembers better times; Poets use Meris to represent age, memory, and cultural loss; In pastoral tradition, Meris embodies the shepherd who has lived through change and displacement; A poet might invoke Meris when depicting the passage of time in pastoral settings; Meris serves as a figure of nostalgia and witness to decline; The character demonstrates how pastoral can address historical change
Additional Notes
Meris appears in Virgil's Ninth Eclogue as an older shepherd who remembers better times before displacement and cultural loss. He represents memory, age, and witness to historical change. Poets invoke Meris when depicting nostalgia, the loss of cultural traditions, and the perspective of those who have lived through decline. The character demonstrates pastoral's capacity to address historical change and cultural loss, showing older shepherds as repositories of memory and mourners for vanished securities and traditions.
Also Known As
pastoral singer rustic poet Theocritean voice
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