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

smirch

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

To soil, stain, or defile—used literally for physical marks or metaphorically for moral taint in allegorical or tragic verse.

Detailed Definition
“Smirch” implies dishonoring stain—smirched reputation, smirched cloth. In poetry, it conveys moral or physical blemish. The term’s sharpness mirrors contamination. Poets use it to explore how purity is lost, where smirching marks betrayal or accident, reinforcing themes of innocence, shame, and the permanence of marks in narrative and moralizing contexts.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The scandal did smirch his noble name,” in a tragic fall; In Shakespeare’s Othello: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on... / Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, / Is the immediate jewel of their souls... / Who steals my purse steals trash... / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed”—echoing “smirch”; “Her honor was smirched by rumor”; “Smirch not truth with half-lies”; “The ink smirched the page, like guilt on conscience”; The knight’s shield was smirched with mud, not blood.
Additional Notes
“Smirch” implies defilement that stains reputation or purity; in honor-based verse, a “smirched name” demands redress, linking physical dirt to social shame in tightly coded moral economies of early modern drama.
Also Known As
stain soil blot
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