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

Ruskin

Ceramics
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

Ruskin refers to high-fired stoneware by Ruskin Pottery with flambé and crystalline glazes.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Ruskin embodies Arts and Crafts ideals of beauty and integrity. Poets use it to explore moral aesthetics and luminous surfaces in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ruskin pottery — the Staffordshire studio pottery known for its extraordinary flambé and souffle glazes — appears in poems about the transformation of the kiln into a site of alchemical experiment; Edward Taylor's Ruskin Pottery, named after John Ruskin but not directly connected to him, produced glazes of exceptional depth and unpredictability — the same formula producing different results from each firing; A poem about the Ruskin glaze might describe its depth: "you could not see the bottom of the colour — it went down into the clay as a lake goes down, the surface merely the beginning"; The Ruskin Pottery's most prized "high-fired" pieces — in deep purples, blues, and flambé effects — appear in poems about the beauty that requires submission to chance: "he prepared the glaze, loaded the kiln, and then the fire decided — what emerged was his only to the degree that he created the conditions for surprise"; In a poem about a museum collection, a Ruskin vase in deep flambe might be described as "the colour of a bruise becoming beautiful — the transition the thing, not the outcome"; A poem about the West Midlands ceramic tradition might invoke Ruskin as the region's finest experiment: "in the shadow of the smoke, a man was making colours that had not existed before — the bottle kilns serving an art the bottle kilns did not know they were making."
Additional Notes
Ruskin Pottery was founded by Edward Richard Taylor at West Smethwick in the West Midlands in 1898 and named after the art critic John Ruskin to signal its Arts and Crafts principles of hand-skill and artistic integrity. The pottery's greatest achievements are its high-fired soufflé and flambé glazes — produced at temperatures above 1300°C — in which molten oxides of copper, iron, and other metals produce spectacular, unpredictable colour effects: crimson, purple, blue, and grey in shifting combinations. These glazes, produced through complex and only partly controllable chemistry, align with the Arts and Crafts interest in natural processes and the beauty of materials working with rather than against the potter's hand.
Also Known As
Arts and Crafts decorative pottery William Morris circle
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