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 V

Vale

Landscape
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 broad fertile valley, often associated with fields and rivers. It has a gentle pastoral character.

Detailed Definition
A vale is a valley imagined less as a rugged cleft than as a broad, inhabited sweep of meadow, farm, river, and village. The term has a traditional poetic music that can lend grandeur or tenderness to rural description. Poets may place harvests, evening smoke, bells, and winding lanes within a vale, using its shelter to contrast with harsher heights. It is especially apt for themes of home, abundance, seasonal cycle, and the remembered ease of a pastoral world.
Example
Example in poetry:
Morning mist filled the vale, hiding sheep and cottages below the hills; A vale is a valley, often used for a peaceful, pastoral setting or for a sheltered emotional space; Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” evokes rural valleys and fields to establish a quiet meditative mood; From the vale rose the smell of wet earth, while sunlight slowly reached the farm roofs
Additional Notes
“Vale” is a poetic and somewhat elevated word for a valley, especially a broad or pleasantly cultivated one. Because of its long literary history, it often carries pastoral associations of rivers, meadows, villages, fertility, seclusion, and peaceful rural life. Poets may also exploit the valley’s low position to contrast it with mountains, spiritual heights, or distant prospects. The phrase “vale of tears” introduces a very different religious association with earthly suffering. Compare valley, dale, dell, glen, pastoral, meadow, lowland, vale of tears, enclosed landscape, and locus amoenus.
Also Known As
Valley Dale dene Tempe
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