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 T

Tea caddy

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 tea caddy is a container for tea leaves, often ceramic or wooden.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, tea caddies guard precious leaves. Poets use for ritual, colonialism, and sensory pleasure.
Example
Example in poetry:
The tea caddy — the container for storing tea, typically lockable in the eighteenth century when tea was an expensive commodity — appears in poems about the domestic economy of the Georgian household and the social ritual of tea; A poem about a Georgian mistress of the house controlling her tea supply might describe the tea caddy's lock: "she kept the key on her chatelaine — the tea locked away as carefully as the silver, the household's small luxury rationed by her hand"; In a poem about the social ritual of tea-making, the tea caddy is the first object handled: "she unlocked it herself — the leaves measured by the spoon she kept inside, the gesture both domestic and sovereign"; Tea caddies in tortoiseshell, silver, papier-mâché, and lacquered wood appear in poems about the decorative arts of the Georgian period: "the caddy more beautiful than the tea — the outside as considered as the inside was precious"; A poem about a grandmother's kitchen might describe a tea caddy still in use: "the tin caddy, its label faded — she measured by eye, not spoon, the right amount for the right number, knowledge in the hand rather than the head"; In a poem about the economics of empire, the tea caddy concentrates the global in the domestic: "the leaves from Assam in a box made in Birmingham, locked with a key kept by a woman in Yorkshire — the empire folded into a thing that fit in the palm."
Additional Notes
The tea caddy (from the Malay kati, a unit of weight for tea) is a sealed container — in wood, metal, ivory, tortoiseshell, papier-mâché, or ceramic — for storing tea leaves, which were expensive enough in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be kept under lock and key. Ceramic tea caddies in Chinese export porcelain, English delftware, and Staffordshire earthenware were produced from the early eighteenth century onward and are significant as objects that embody the social, economic, and cultural history of the tea trade. In poetry, the tea caddy stands for the domestic rituals of tea-drinking, the economics of colonial trade, and the hoarding of precious, fragrant commodities.
Also Known As
Tea canister
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