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 P

Parian ware

Ceramics
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

Parian ware is fine-grained, marble-like porcelain used for statuettes and busts.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Parian mimics classical sculpture in affordable form. In poetry, it represents idealized beauty and Victorian sentiment.
Example
Example in poetry:
Parian ware — the unglazed white biscuit porcelain developed by Copeland in the 1840s, resembling Carrara marble — appears in Victorian poems as the democratisation of sculpture: Raphael and Shakespeare in every parlour; A poem about the Victorian household's aspirations might describe a Parian ware bust of Milton on the bookcase: "the same white brow that Carrara lent to dukes, here cooling on a clerk's shelf — ambition's affordable monument"; The name "Parian" — evoking the Greek island famous for its white marble — gives the material a classical respectability that its manufacturers deliberately cultivated; In a poem about art's reproducibility (anticipating Walter Benjamin), a Parian figure of a bathing Venus is "the original's argument that it needed no original — the copy complete in itself, the beauty not diminished by repetition"; Parian ware figures of famous poets — Tennyson, Burns, Byron — appear in poems about celebrity and the consuming of literary greatness: "he sat on a thousand bookshelves simultaneously — the poet as Parian, the face reproduced until it meant everything and nothing"; A poem about a Victorian parlour's aspirations might catalogue its Parian ware alongside its bound volumes and its framed engravings: the household's claim to culture, each object a small manifesto.
Additional Notes
Parian ware, developed at the Copeland factory (and sometimes attributed to Minton) around 1842–45, is a fine-grained, slightly translucent white porcelain that naturally resembles Parian marble from the Greek island of Paros. It was specifically developed for the production of small-scale sculptural reproductions and portrait busts, making fine sculpture accessible to middle-class homes that could not afford marble originals. Parian figures of classical gods, literary heroes (Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens), and political figures were enormously popular throughout the Victorian period. As an educational tool, Parian brought classical and contemporary imagery into everyday domestic experience and is closely connected to Victorian ideals of self-improvement through art.
Also Known As
Parian porcelain Statuary porcelain
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