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

Sublime

Philosophy
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

The sublime is an aesthetic quality of greatness, power, or terror that overwhelms the senses and intellect. It is an experience of awe mixed with fear.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
From Longinus to Kant, the sublime involves a confrontation with the infinite. In poetry, it appears as a theme of nature's awe-inspiring power, or of human ambition. Poetic language strives to capture the unrepresentable, creating a sense of vastness. The sublime gives poetry its capacity for profound emotional impact, moving beyond beauty to a more complex, unsettling experience of greatness and limitation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about a vast, terrifying landscape, like "Mont Blanc" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, invokes the sublime; The awe-inspiring nature of a starry night in a poem by John Keats is an experience of the sublime; The power of a great waterfall, as described in a poem, is a sublime subject; A poem that confronts the limits of human reason in the face of the infinite, like a poem on the ocean, is about the sublime.
Additional Notes
The sublime is an aesthetic and philosophical concept that describes a quality of greatness, power, or terror that overwhelms our senses and intellect. It is an experience of awe mixed with fear, often evoked by the vastness of nature (a towering mountain, a stormy sea) or by the infinite power of the human mind. Immanuel Kant distinguished the sublime from the beautiful: the beautiful is pleasurable and limited, while the sublime is painful yet exhilarating, pushing us to our limits. In poetry, the sublime appears as a theme of confronting the infinite, the unknowable, or the terrifying. Poetic language strives to capture the unrepresentable, creating a sense of overwhelming grandeur. This concept gives poetry its capacity for profound emotional impact.
Other Meanings of “Sublime”
Also Known As
The Sublime Aesthetic terror Transcendent greatness
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