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

Phthisic

Disease
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

Affected by phthisis, an older name for pulmonary tuberculosis. It suggests coughing, wasting, and a slow approach to death.

Detailed Definition
Phthisic is a rare historical term whose severity and strangeness can give a poem a period voice. Phthisis commonly referred to the wasting lung disease now identified as tuberculosis, and its poetic use may call up weak breath, bloodied handkerchiefs, narrow rooms, or failed vitality. Because the word is medically archaic, it can distance the speaker from suffering while also preserving the dread of an illness once widely fatal and poorly understood.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The phthisic poet coughed blood into a handkerchief” invokes an old word for tuberculosis, often associated with nineteenth-century literature; “Phthisic light thinned on the curtains” uses the term metaphorically for weak, wasting illumination; A historical speaker might say, “My phthisic sister sang softly between breaths,” emphasizing frailty without romanticizing it; “The phthisic winter consumed the last green leaves” makes seasonal decline resemble wasting illness
Additional Notes
Phthisic is an archaic adjective linked to tuberculosis. It evokes the Romantic and Victorian association of coughing, pallor, wasting, and doomed beauty.
Also Known As
Phthisical Consumptive
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