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

Phthisical

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

“Phthisical” means affected by phthisis, especially tuberculosis or a wasting pulmonary illness. It suggests frailty, coughing, breathlessness, and gradual physical decline.

Detailed Definition
Phthisical is an archaic adjective associated with phthisis, a wasting disease historically used especially for pulmonary tuberculosis. In literary traditions shaped by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it may evoke the pale, weakened figure whose body diminishes through fever, coughing, and loss of breath. Poets use the term in elegiac or Gothic settings to explore mortality, confinement, poverty, and the uneasy idealization of sickly beauty. Its old-fashioned medical register can also place a poem in an earlier era, where illness was both intimate experience and social fate.
Example
Example in poetry:
Phthisical cough echoing through the drafty room (John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"); A phthisical flush burning on her hollow cheek (Emily Brontë, "A Death-Scene"); Phthisical frame wasted by the slow decay (Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais"); Phthisical breath catching in the winter chill (George Crabbe, "The Village"); Phthisical decline stealing the young singer's voice (Christina Rossetti, "Remember")
Additional Notes
"Phthisical" means afflicted with phthisis (tuberculosis or pulmonary consumption), a disease marked by severe coughing, fever, and progressive wasting away. In 19th-century Romantic literature, phthisis was famously romanticized as the "artist's disease"—associated with tragic youth, intense passion, pale beauty, and heightened creative genius (exemplified by John Keats). Students analyzing 19th-century verse should examine how phthisical imagery reflects the era's fascinating, tragic link between bodily decay and aesthetic sensitivity. Related terms include tubercular, consumptive, emaciated, and wasting.
Also Known As
Consumptive Tubercular Wasting Phthisic
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