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

Stane

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 stone; the Scots form of "stone," grounding verse in the hard material of Scottish landscape.

Detailed Definition
"Stane" appears throughout Scots poetry as the substance of landscape, architecture, and endurance. Scotland's stony landscape — its kirks, its castle walls, its hillsides — is rendered in "stane" with a directness that the more formal "stone" lacks. In elegies and poems of place, stanes mark graves and boundaries; in work poems they represent labour and permanence. The word's brief, hard sound suits its subject, and it carries the weight of a landscape shaped by glaciation and human toil across centuries.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Stane" means stone; Burns uses "stane" throughout; A poet might write: "He built a wa' of mossy stane — / each rock a decade o' the rain." uses stone as a record of time; "She laid a stane for every loss — / a cairn below the iron cross." creates a ritual of grief; "Stane does not forget the mason's hand — / it holds the shape of human plan." personifies stone; "As cauld as stane, his answer fell — / into the silence of the well." uses stone for emotional coldness; "The stane at the head of the road says hame — / though the house itself is no more the same." makes a milestone carry elegy
Additional Notes
Stane grounds Scots verse in the fundamental materiality of the Scottish landscape — a landscape shaped as much by rock as by water. The stane in Scottish poetry is wall, gravestone, stepping-stone, boundary marker, and weapon all at once. Its hardness and permanence make it an ideal image for endurance, resistance, and the weight of history. In love poetry, hearts "harder than stane" are conventional images of cruelty; in landscape poetry, stanes are simply facts of the terrain. Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid, and many contemporary poets have all engaged with the stony quality of Scottish place. For students, "stane" is a reminder of how physical geography shapes poetic imagination.
Also Known As
Stone Rock
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