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 U

Utica

Historical Location
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

Ancient Phoenician city in North Africa, rival and precursor to Carthage

Detailed Definition
Utica was older than Carthage and sided with Rome in the Punic Wars. Cato the Younger died there. Poets use Utica to symbolize the moral choice against tyranny, the tragedy of republican suicide, and the complex loyalties of North African cities under imperial pressure.
Example
Example in poetry:
A Roman elegist mourns Utica as Cato’s suicide site—republican virtue crushed by Caesar; In a Punic-inspired lyric, Utica symbolizes pre-Carthaginian Berber sovereignty; A modern Tunisian poem reclaims Utica as North African memory beyond Roman tragedy; A minimalist verse reduces Utica to Medjerda river silt and broken treaty; A historical meditation imagines Utica’s elders welcoming Carthaginian refugees after 146 BCE; A postcolonial critique questions why Utica is remembered only through Cato’s death.
Additional Notes
Utica, older than Carthage and originally its Phoenician mother-city, became a Roman ally during the Punic Wars and later a center of Republican resistance (Cato the Younger died there); its shift from Carthaginian rival to Roman moral exemplum illustrates how cities are repurposed in ideological narratives—key for analyzing poetic treatments of loyalty, decline, and civic virtue.
Also Known As
Carthaginian port Cato suicide African colony
Skip to main content