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

Runnymede

Historical Allusion
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

Runnymede is the meadow where King John sealed Magna Carta in 1215, symbolizing limits on monarchy.

Detailed Definition
Runnymede, the meadow beside the Thames where King John sealed Magna Carta in 1215 under pressure from rebellious barons, stands in poetry as the symbolic birthplace of constitutional liberty and the rule of law. The charter's insistence that even the monarch must answer to established law planted a seed that grew across centuries into parliamentary democracy and human rights frameworks. Poets invoke Runnymede to evoke the long, contested struggle for foundational freedoms, the idea that liberty must be wrested from power rather than granted by it, and the enduring significance of a single, muddy field in the history of justice.
Example
Example in poetry:
Magna Carta was sealed at Runnymede in 1215 — poets have used this meadow as a symbol of the first moment power was made to answer to law; A student poet might write "at Runnymede the barons forced the king's hand and the word 'liberty' got its first legal address" to use the meadow as a foundation site; Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Reeds of Runnymede," in which the Thames-side grasses whisper the rights that were won there: "And still when Mob or Monarch lays / Too rude a hand on English ways..."; A poet writing "Runnymede is the answer to the question: where does freedom begin? In a field, beside a river, under the threat of force" uses the place as a universal symbol of constitutional origin; A student poet might write "they didn't call it democracy at Runnymede — they called it limits on the king, and democracy came later, following the map that was drawn there"
Additional Notes
Runnymede is a meadow, and the significance of that ordinariness is itself poetic — one of the most consequential legal events in English history took place not in a palace or a parliament but in a field by a river. Magna Carta, sealed there in 1215, established the principle that even the king was subject to law. Poets invoke Runnymede to evoke the founding of constitutional liberty and the English tradition of wresting rights from power. It connects to the Bill of Rights and the broader tradition of documents limiting arbitrary authority. Kipling wrote a poem about it; John F. Kennedy's memorial there adds an American dimension.
Other Meanings of “Runnymede”
Also Known As
Runnymede Meadow Fields of Runnymede Magna Carta Meadow Runnymede Field
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