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 N

Noumenon

Philosophy
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

Noumenon, in Kant, is the thing-in-itself—reality as it exists independently of human perception, which is ultimately unknowable.

Detailed Definition
Poetry gestures toward the noumenon through apophatic language, sublime imagery, or mystical longing—acknowledging the limits of representation. The tension between phenomenal appearance and noumenal reality fuels poetic attempts to touch the unsayable.
Example
Example in poetry:
Immanuel Kant’s noumenon appears in Wallace Stevens’s "The Snow Man," which hints at a reality beyond human projection; T.S. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" gestures toward an unknowable divine ground; Rainer Maria Rilke’s "Duino Elegies" treat angels as noumenal beings beyond human comprehension; the sublime in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Mont Blanc" points to a power that "dwells apart in its own strength"; poetic apophasis (e.g., St. John of the Cross) approaches the noumenon by saying what God is not.
Additional Notes
Noumenon (Kant) is the unknowable thing-in-itself beyond phenomena; poetry gestures toward it through the sublime (Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”), apophatic theology (Donne), or negative capability (Keats); useful for interpreting poems that acknowledge the limits of representation while striving toward what lies beyond language.
Also Known As
Thing-in-Itself Noumenal Reality Thing in itself
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