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

mire

Archaic Terms
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

Swampy ground, deep mud, or bog; also used figuratively for difficult situations or moral degradation, being stuck in problems.

Detailed Definition
"Mire" derives from Old Norse "mýrr" (bog, swamp), referring to deep, sticky mud or swampy ground, and metaphorically to difficult, degrading situations. The term appears literally in descriptions of travel, landscape, or weather where muddy conditions impeded movement, and figuratively when describing moral degradation, difficult circumstances, or situations from which escape seemed impossible. Poets valued its dual literal and metaphorical utility—physical mire made vivid metaphor for moral or circumstantial entrapment. Biblical associations with miry clay and mire of sin gave it religious resonance. The word efficiently conveys both physical substance and symbolic meaning, making it powerful for poetry exploring themes of degradation, difficulty, and entrapment. Its suggestion of sticky, clinging difficulty that impedes progress made it apt for describing both physical obstacles and psychological or moral predicaments from which extrication required substantial effort.
Example
Example in poetry:
The horses struggled through deep mire; "Mired in sin and degradation" uses metaphor; Mire means swamp, mud, or moral degradation; The wagon wheels stuck fast in the mire; Spring rains turned roads into treacherous mire; To mire means to sink or become stuck
Additional Notes
Mire appears in both literal descriptions of muddy ground and figurative representations of moral degradation or difficult situations. The term's dual usage makes it valuable for analyzing nature-morality metaphors. Bunyan's "Slough of Despond" exemplifies metaphorical mire. Related to "quagmire" and "bog" but more commonly used metaphorically. Essential for analyzing landscape imagery, moral degradation metaphors, and how literature links physical and spiritual states. The term suggests both difficulty of extraction and contaminating quality of mud—being in mire degrades. Useful for discussing how texts use landscape for moral allegory, the body-in-nature as metaphor for spiritual condition, and whether being "mired" implies victim status or culpability for entering dangerous ground.
Also Known As
mud slime filth swamp drabble
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