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

Privet

Flora
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

An evergreen or semi-evergreen shrub with white flowers and black berries, commonly used for hedging.

Detailed Definition
Privet appears in poetry as symbol of boundaries, privacy, and suburban order. Its use in formal hedges makes it represent civilization's geometric imposition on nature. The plant's tolerance of severe pruning represents endurance under constraint. In suburban poetry, privet hedges might represent conformity, neatness, or the boundaries between neighbors. The small white flowers and black berries provide detail often overlooked. Poets use privet to explore themes of containment, shaping, boundaries, and the plants that define spaces and create structure.
Example
Example in poetry:
Privet hedges represent boundary, privacy, and suburban conformity; In English garden poetry, clipped privet symbolizes order, control, and municipal planting; The plant's rapid growth and need for frequent trimming creates metaphors for maintenance and containment; Privet flowers' heavy scent (loved or hated) adds sensory divisiveness; In urban poetry, privet represents the vegetation of everyday life and common landscapes; Wild privet in woodlands contrasts with geometric garden hedges, showing tamed versus free
Additional Notes
Privet is a hedge plant of boundaries and suburbia, often evoking neatness, privacy, and the quiet politics of property lines. Its small white flowers can be strongly scented, sometimes unpleasantly so, which gives poets a chance to complicate “garden beauty” with realism. The black berries can suggest hidden toxicity or the dark fruit of restraint. Privet is a good tool for modern poems about domestic life: the green wall that both shelters and separates neighbours.
Also Known As
Ligustrum Prim
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