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

Souther

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

To solder or fuse together; also sometimes used to mean to mend or repair.

Detailed Definition
"Souther" is a technical term that appears in Scots verse in contexts of craft, repair, and making whole again. Its presence in poetry signals the tradition's interest in skilled labour and the dignity of making and mending. In a broader metaphorical sense it can describe the repair of relationships or the healing of divisions, and its concrete, practical origin gives such metaphorical uses a grounded quality. The word exemplifies how Scots preserves vocabulary for processes that English has either lost or rendered in more abstract terms.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Souther" means to solder, mend, or patch; A poet might write: "He southered the cracked pan wi' care — / the mended thing beyond compare." celebrates repair; "Love southers what the years have cracked — / and makes the broken beautiful and tracked." uses the term as metaphor for emotional repair; "She southered her courage when it broke — / and returned tae the fire from the smoke." applies the word to self-repair; "The tinker southered as he went — / a life of mending, well and spent." creates a character; "What God and nature break apart — / it takes the southerer's art tae start." reflects on craft as vocation
Additional Notes
Souther sits on an interesting semantic boundary — its literal sense (to solder, to fuse) is practical and technical, but its figurative extensions into the ideas of repair, mending, and holding together give it metaphorical range. In verse it can describe the mending of broken things — relationships, wounds, communities — with a precision that more general "mend" or "fix" cannot quite achieve. The idea of soldering implies heat, pressure, and permanence: things "sothered" together are meant to stay joined. For students, it is worth noting how craft vocabulary in Scots poetry often carries metaphorical weight — the language of material making (soldering, weaving, building) becomes the language of human making as well.
Also Known As
Southerly wind South wind
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