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.

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 P

Pall

Life And Death
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 cloth spread over a coffin or grave. It can also mean a dark covering that suggests sorrow or death.

Detailed Definition
A pall is a ceremonial cloth placed over a coffin during a funeral, often symbolizing dignity, equality in death, or religious hope. In poetry, the word also carries its figurative sense of a dark mantle cast over a landscape, household, or mind. Smoke, fog, silence, and despair may be described as a pall, linking emotional heaviness to funeral imagery. Its double meaning makes it useful for atmospheres of grief and foreboding.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” evening darkness falls over the landscape like a pall, creating a funeral atmosphere; A poet might write, “A pall of smoke crossed the noon,” using pall to make ordinary darkness feel mournful and oppressive; In a burial poem, “They drew the black pall over the coffin” uses the word literally for the cloth covering a coffin; A pall can also suggest collective sorrow, as in “After the verdict, a pall lay over the city”
Additional Notes
A pall is literally a funeral cloth, but its figurative use describes gloom settling over a place or mind. Notice whether the image conceals, protects, honors, or oppresses what lies beneath it.
Other Meanings of “Pall”
Also Known As
Funeral Pall Mortcloth
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