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

Terror

Psychology
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

Extreme, overwhelming fear, often of an existential or cosmic nature; in poetry, terror transcends mere fright, plunging the speaker into a state of paralysis, awe, or confrontation with the sublime.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Gothic Poetry — Gothic poetry turns shadows, ruins, storms and supernatural suggestion into ways of exploring human fear, longing, guilt and uncertainty. More than a collection of frightening images, it is a flexible tradition concerned with what reason cannot comfortably explain.

Detailed Definition
Terror in poetry ascends to the sublime—vastness, death, divine wrath. It appears in Gothic, apocalyptic, and war verse, with images of abyss, storm, or monstrous shadows. Poets use terror to confront the limits of human control and comprehension. Terror invites awe, dread, and catharsis, as in Burke's sublime. It can be purifying or annihilating, making the poem a space for facing the overwhelming and finding meaning in the abyss.
Example
Example in poetry:
Terror in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Conqueror Worm" where terror is a theme; In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel," terror is a Gothic trope; In W.H. Auden's "They," terror is existential; In contemporary horror poetry, terror is a genre; In "The Waste Land," terror is a theme; In Gothic poetry, terror is a key element.
Additional Notes
Terror in poetry ascends to the sublime—vastness, death, divine wrath—appearing in Gothic, apocalyptic, and war verse with images of abyss, storm, or monstrous shadows. In teaching, distinguish terror from horror: terror is overwhelming fear, while horror is revulsive fear. Terror confronts limits of control and comprehension, inviting awe and catharsis. It can be purifying or annihilating. Students should examine how poets use imagery of vastness, darkness, and power, along with awe-struck tones, to convey terror's sublime, overwhelming force.
Also Known As
Dread horror fear panic awe Fright Nightmare
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