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

Shadow

Philosophy
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 shadow is the unconscious, repressed part of the personality, containing qualities the ego finds unacceptable. It is the dark, hidden side of the self.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
Jung's shadow is a central archetype. In poetry, it appears in themes of guilt, violence, and forbidden desires. A poet may explore their own shadow or embody it in a character. The shadow enriches poetry with psychological depth, revealing the conflicts that drive human behavior. Confronting the shadow is a key theme, representing the path to wholeness and self-knowledge in poetic narratives.
Example
Example in poetry:
The dark, aggressive side of a speaker in a poem, like the one in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," is a manifestation of the shadow; A poem that explores the theme of guilt and hidden crime, like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," deals with the shadow; The monsters and villains in epic poetry, like Grendel in "Beowulf," are often projections of the shadow; A confessional poet like Anne Sexton explicitly confronted her own shadow, writing about depression and dark desires.
Additional Notes
The shadow is a central archetype in Carl Jung's analytical psychology. It represents the unconscious, repressed part of the personality that the conscious ego rejects, denies, or is unaware of. This "dark side" often contains qualities, desires, and impulses that we consider unacceptable or immoral, such as aggression, greed, and sexual fantasies. In poetry, the shadow appears in themes of guilt, violence, and forbidden desires. A poet may explore their own shadow or embody it in a monstrous character. The shadow enriches poetry with psychological depth, revealing the conflicts that drive human behavior. Confronting the shadow is a key theme in many poetic works, representing the path to wholeness and self-knowledge.
Also Known As
Dark side Repressed self Jungian shadow shade Sheut Hyde
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