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 R

Ridden

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

“Ridden” means afflicted, burdened, or overrun by disease. It often appears in compounds such as “disease-ridden,” suggesting pervasive suffering or corruption.

Detailed Definition
Ridden is an adjective that presents illness as something possessing, burdening, or invading a body, place, or community. A disease-ridden village, house, or body seems not merely unhealthy but overwhelmed by an active force. In poetry, the word is frequently figurative, applied to societies ridden with fear, injustice, vice, or decay. Its force comes from the sense that the sufferer cannot easily escape what afflicts it, making physical disease a potent image for entrenched moral, emotional, and social damage.
Example
Example in poetry:
Grief-ridden soul wandering through the lonely hall (Lord Byron, "Manfred"); Bed-ridden king looking out upon his lost empire (Lord Tennyson, "The Passing of Arthur"); Crime-ridden street where shadows lurk in darkness (William Blake, "London"); Panic-ridden crowd fleeing from the rising fire (Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Masque of Anarchy"); Guilt-ridden conscience finding no rest at night (William Shakespeare, "Macbeth")
Additional Notes
"Ridden" means dominated, oppressed, or thoroughly afflicted by something burdensome—most commonly used in compound words like disease-ridden, grief-ridden, or guilt-ridden. In poetic diction, using "ridden" emphasizes an inescapable state of psychological or physical oppression. Students should analyze how poets use ridden compounds to quickly establish an atmosphere of total, overwhelming burden, where the persona is completely possessed by their affliction. Related terms include afflicted, burdened, beset, and dominated.
Also Known As
Infested Afflicted Beset Plagued
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