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

Tereus

Mythology
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

Thracian king who raped his sister-in-law Philomela and cut out her tongue. When the truth emerged, he was transformed into a hoopoe bird, Philomela into a nightingale, his wife into a swallow.

Detailed Definition
Tereus mutilated Philomela after raping her; she and her sister Procne took revenge by serving his son to him. All were turned into birds. In poetry, he embodies brutality, the cycle of vengeance, and the metamorphosis of trauma into eternal forms.
Example
Example in poetry:
Tereus, who rapes Philomela, is transformed into a hoopoe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; In Sophocles’ lost play Tereus, the sisters’ revenge is central; Virgil alludes to Tereus’s crime in Georgics; Later Roman poetry cites Tereus as a symbol of brutality; Renaissance tragedy uses Tereus to explore violence and voice; Modern feminist verse reclaims Philomela’s story against Tereus.
Additional Notes
Tereus, Thracian king who raped Philomela and cut out her tongue, was transformed into a hoopoe; his myth (Ovid) explores violence, voicelessness, and avian metamorphosis—ideal for poetry on trauma, revenge (Procne serves him his son), or the limits of justice.
Also Known As
Thracian King Violator of Philomela Bird-Transformed Tyrant
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