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

sultry

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

Oppressively hot and humid—creating an atmosphere of languor or discomfort, common in descriptive or Gothic poetry.

Detailed Definition
“Sultry” conveys atmospheric heaviness—sultry nights, sultry passions. In poetry, it symbolizes languor or erotic tension. The term’s softness mirrors humidity. Poets use it to explore how climate affects mood, where sultriness breeds desire or lethargy, reinforcing themes of sensuality, decay, and environmental influence in descriptive and lyrical traditions.
Example
Example in poetry:
The sultry air hung thick as velvet over the marshes, stifling breath and thought alike; "Sultry the night, and loud the frogs that croak," wrote Coleridge in a notebook fragment; In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus describes Egypt’s "sultry vapours" that cling to the flesh; Romantic poets often used "sultry" to evoke oppressive heat as a metaphor for passion or moral decay; "Sultry noon" appears in Milton’s Paradise Lost to mark the hour of lethargy and temptation; The sultry silence before the storm mirrored the tension in the lovers’ unspoken words.
Additional Notes
The term “sultry” persists in modern English but carries stronger archaic connotations in poetry, often evoking oppressive, languid atmospheres that mirror emotional or moral decay; in Romantic and Gothic verse, it frequently appears in descriptions of tropical or infernal settings to heighten sensuality or dread.
Also Known As
oppressive sweltering humid
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