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

Stour

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

Dust, or a choking cloud of dust; also strife or conflict in older usage.

Detailed Definition
"Stour" is magnificently evocative, naming the dust that rises from dry roads, threshing floors, and battle fields alike. Its dual meaning — literal dust and figurative conflict — makes it exceptionally rich for poetry, and the two senses often inform each other. In pastoral verse it describes the dust of farm labour; in epic or satirical verse it suggests the confusion and struggle of human conflict. The word's own sound — abrupt, rough — mirrors the irritant it names, making it one of the more sensuously accurate words in Scots.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Stour" means dust, conflict, struggle, or a stormy onset; A poet might write: "Through stour and storm the ploughman goes — / the soil demands what no man knows." for a poem of agricultural endurance; "She rose frae the stour of all she'd lost — / and counted what her courage cost." uses the word for post-struggle recovery; "The stour of argument filled the room — / a battle's dust, a friendship's tomb." applies the word to interpersonal conflict; "Through a' the stour of this long year — / one constant shone exceeding clear." uses struggle as contrast for love's endurance; "The stour of centuries lies here — / in the stones that still the hillside wear." gives the word historical weight
Additional Notes
Stour shares its territory with "stoor" (both mean dust or choking cloud) but tends to appear more often in its older sense of strife and conflict — the "stour" of battle, the struggle of combatants. This martial dimension connects it to the tradition of heroic verse and the epic description of conflict. In modern usage the two forms have largely merged, but in reading historical Scots verse students should be aware that "stour" in older texts often means conflict or tumult rather than mere dust. The overlap between physical cloud and emotional/martial confusion is semantically interesting — both involve agitation, dispersal, and a loss of clear vision, so the metaphorical extension is natural.
Also Known As
Dust storm Turmoil Commotion
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