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.

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

Sunderland lustre

Ceramics
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

Sunderland lustre is a type of English lustreware from Sunderland with pink or purple metallic glazes and nautical motifs.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Sunderland lustre combines shimmer with maritime themes, reflecting regional industry and seafaring culture. Poets use it to evoke coastal life, romance of the sea, and reflective surfaces that mirror inner states. These pieces support themes of journey, memory, and luminous transience in verse. Sunderland lustre enriches poetic interiors with regional specificity and glowing allure.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sunderland lustre — the pink lustre earthenware produced in northeast England, typically decorated with transfer prints of the Wearmouth Bridge, ships, and Masonic or temperance motifs — appears in poems about Tyne and Wear industrial culture and the art of the working-class home; A poem about a Sunderland sailor's family might describe the lustre jug on the dresser: "the bridge in pink on a white ground, the verse below it — 'May Peace and Plenty / On Our Nation Smile' — the wish and the bridge both engineering achievements of different kinds"; The Wearmouth Bridge motif — one of the first cast iron bridges, reproduced on hundreds of pieces of Sunderland lustre — gives poems about the intersection of industrial and decorative arts a specific image; In a poem about a northeast England interior, Sunderland lustre is as specific as dialect: "the pink shimmer on the shelf, the same shelf in a thousand houses, the same bridge — the whole community reflected in its own pink light"; The temperance verses found on some Sunderland lustre pieces — "Touch Not the Unclean Thing" — make the pottery a carrier of moral as well as decorative intent; A poem about a house clearance in Sunderland might describe a lustre jug: "the bridge still standing on its surface, the river below it still flowing — the bridge outside the window gone for thirty years."
Additional Notes
Sunderland lustre, produced at the Wearside potteries of northeast England (particularly Dixon, Austin & Co. and the Garrison Pottery) from the early nineteenth century, is characterised by its distinctive pink-purple metallic glaze — achieved with platinum — splashed or mottled over a white or cream ground, and by its transfer-printed decoration of ships, bridges (particularly the celebrated cast-iron Wearmouth Bridge of 1796), sailors' poems, Masonic symbols, and moral verses. Sunderland lustre jugs and plaques were popular gifts for sailors and their families, connecting ceramics directly to poetry through the sentimental verses printed on them. In cultural history, Sunderland lustre is an important example of popular print culture absorbed into the ceramic tradition.
Also Known As
pink lustreware nautical pottery English lustre
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