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 O

Orlando

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

The heroic yet love-maddened knight in Ariosto’s epic, whose descent into furor explores the destructive power of unrequited passion.

Detailed Definition
Orlando (Roland) is the chivalric hero of Ludovico Ariosto’s 16th-century epic Orlando Furioso, whose unrequited love for Angelica drives him to madness. His name became synonymous with romantic obsession and the collapse of reason under passion. Poets invoke Orlando to examine the irrationality of love, the fragility of the heroic ideal, and the interplay of fantasy and reality.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Orlando goes mad: “Reason, lost in love, flies to the stars”; Alexander Pope mocks Orlando’s frenzy in “The Dunciad”: “Orlando raves, and raving dies”; In “Orlando Furioso,” Angelica’s abandonment drives him to tear up trees and howl at the moon; Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered contrasts Orlando’s madness with Rinaldo’s restraint; Byron references “Orlando’s passion” in Don Juan as emblematic of romantic excess; Matthew Arnold cites Orlando as a symbol of chivalric ideals undone by emotion in “Empedocles on Etna.”
Additional Notes
Orlando (Roland) is the hero of Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” whose unrequited love for Angelica drives him to madness—hence “furioso.” The poem parodies chivalric romance while celebrating poetic invention. Orlando’s madness (losing reason for love) contrasts with his earlier valor, illustrating Renaissance tensions between passion and rationality. Later poets (Byron, Pope) use him to critique romantic idealism. Students should note Ariosto’s ottava rima and narrative digressions, which influenced Spenser and Milton. Orlando is key for studying the romance epic, metafiction, and the psychology of love. Related terms: chivalry, madness, intertextuality.
Also Known As
Roland Paladin of Charlemagne Hero of Roncesvalles Orlando Furioso
Skip to main content