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

Sou

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

A small French coin or colloquial term for a tiny amount of money, roughly akin to a penny.

Detailed Definition
The “sou” evolved from the solidus and came to mean a small coin in French-speaking regions, often used idiomatically in phrases about having or lacking money. In poetry and song, “sou” evokes street life, café chatter, and the struggles of workers and beggars, where every little coin matters. It can lend a poem a distinct Gallic flavour, especially in translations that retain the French term. Writers may use it to stress frugality, to depict the dignity and humour of the poor, or to contrast the light sound of the word with the heaviness of deprivation.
Example
Example in poetry:
He had not a sou to spare, yet he gave a smile richer than gold; “Pas un sou,” she sighed, and the whole shabby garret seemed to echo her; The poet peppers French dialogue with “sou” to keep the café scene authentic; A single sou in the poem weighs hunger, pride, and the lightness of the word itself.
Additional Notes
Sou is common in French idiom (“pas un sou”), and in English texts it is often left untranslated to preserve local colour. In poetry, mentioning a sou can instantly evoke Parisian or provincial French settings, with their cafés, markets, and struggling artists. Since a sou is a tiny unit, it easily becomes a metaphor for scarcity or the smallest measure of value. The term is particularly effective in dialogue or interior monologue, where it signals a speaker’s relationship to money and language. Scholars may track how translations handle “sou,” as choices here shape the social feel of the poem.
Also Known As
French sou
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