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

Syllabub glass

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

A type of glass vessel for syllabub, a frothy dessert drink; in poetry, a material object evoking conviviality, luxury, or historical domestic detail.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, syllabub glasses delight with lightness. Poets reference indulgence and ephemerality.
Example
Example in poetry:
The syllabub glass — a tall, narrow glass for the dessert drink made of sweetened cream and wine — appears in poems about Georgian dessert culture and the elaborate ceremony of the sweet course; A poem about a Georgian dessert table might describe the syllabub glasses standing in rows: "the cream already whipped and sweetened, the wine poured below — the glasses holding their two-part contents in delicious suspension"; The syllabub glass's shape — tall to allow the cream to float, narrow to concentrate the pleasure — gives poets an image of form following function with elegance; In a poem about a country house dinner in the eighteenth century, the syllabub glass appears after the roast and before the port: "the sweet cream, the sweet wine — the table's middle register, neither the ceremony of the joint nor the gravity of the decanter"; A poem about a recipe from Hannah Glasse or Elizabeth Raffald might describe the preparation: "whip the cream to stiffness, add the wine below it — the syllabub glass the vessel in which the two remain distinct, each the better for the other's presence"; In a poem about the pleasure of old forms, the syllabub glass appears as evidence that some previous centuries knew what they were doing: "the shape arrived at by use, not design — the glass that is exactly right for the thing it holds."
Additional Notes
The syllabub glass is a tall, narrow, footed glass vessel used for serving syllabub — a dessert of sweetened cream beaten with wine or cider into a frothy mixture that separated into a liquid whey below and a solid cream above. The glass's narrow shape displayed this separation clearly and allowed the drinker to sip through a spout. Syllabub glasses were produced in glass, but ceramic equivalents in delftware and early English porcelain exist. As a historical form, the syllabub glass evokes the elaborate dessert culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which porcelain and glass competed to display sweetness in the most refined vessel.
Also Known As
Syllabub cup
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