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 S

Sark

Dialect
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

A shirt or chemise; a basic garment close to the body, carrying intimate associations.

Detailed Definition
"Sark" appears memorably in Burns's "Tam o' Shanter," where Nannie's "cutty sark" (short shirt) becomes the central erotic and comic image of the poem. The word carries associations of intimacy, exposure, and vulnerability, and in the poem it transforms a simple garment into a symbol of desire and transgression. More broadly, "sark" grounds verse in the physical, bodily world of everyday life, the cloth against the skin, and it exemplifies how Scots vocabulary clothes the body in words that English cannot quite replicate.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Sark" means a shirt or chemise; Burns mentions "sark" in several poems, notably in "Tam o' Shanter" where Nannie's "cutty sark" (short shirt) is a key image; A poet might write: "His auld grey sark hung on the door — / a ghost of all he'd worn before." uses the garment as memorial; "She stitched his sark by candlelight — / nae payment but the doing right." honours domestic labour; "A thin sark's no defence against / the kind of cold that lives in chance." uses the garment to represent vulnerability; "In his one guid sark he stood tae speak — / a man who'd nothing more tae seek." creates dignified simplicity; "The sark on the line in the morning breeze / spoke of ordinary life with ease." finds poetry in the domestic scene
Additional Notes
Sark is a word that carries intense bodily intimacy — the shirt worn next to the skin is the garment most closely associated with the body itself, and in verse this intimacy is rarely neutral. In ballad tradition, the "sark" often appears in supernatural contexts: witches wear short sarks in Burns's "Tam o' Shanter," and the intimate garment becomes charged with erotic and uncanny energy. The word also appears in practical domestic contexts — mending, washing, wearing out — where its associations are simply those of bodily life and the labour of those who care for bodies. Students should be alert to the sark's double life as both prosaic garment and charged symbolic object.
Also Known As
Shirt Undershirt Chemise
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