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

Rouble

Archaic Terms
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

The traditional currency unit of Russia, historically used in both coin and paper form.

Detailed Definition
The rouble has expressed Russian wealth and hardship across tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, its value rising and collapsing with wars and reforms. In older poetry or translations, references to roubles ground narratives in specific social worlds—serfs, officials, gamblers, and revolutionaries counting wages or bribes. Poets exploit the word’s harsh consonants to echo the harshness of climate and rule, or to contrast rustic poverty with imperial splendour. The rouble becomes a symbol of fluctuating power, measuring not only goods but the price of loyalty, compromise, and survival in a vast, troubled land.
Example
Example in poetry:
He stuffed roubles into his boot, preparing for a journey that might never end; For ten roubles the guard looked away, and history shifted by a breath; The poem’s roubles smell of cabbage, cold stairwells, and whispered dissent; Poets spend roubles on paper to show a Russia where currency and conscience are both unstable.
Additional Notes
Rouble is deeply entwined with Russian cultural narratives—tsarist grandeur, Soviet scarcity, and post-Soviet volatility. In poetry it often appears in contexts of wages, bribes, or petty transactions in cramped flats and bureaucratic offices, capturing the texture of everyday life. Its fluctuating real-world value allows poets to treat it as a symbol of instability, both economic and political. When reading translations, note how rouble might carry different connotations depending on the era depicted. For students, tracing roubles through a poem can illuminate how money mediates relationships in Russian literature, from Dostoevskian debts to modern satire.
Also Known As
ruble
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