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

Vanitas

Art
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 symbolic artwork that reflects on mortality, time, and the transience of worldly life.

Detailed Definition
Vanitas images often include skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, clocks, fruit, books, and luxury objects to remind viewers that beauty, knowledge, and possession are temporary. Rather than simply moralizing, they can intensify appreciation of the present. In poetry, vanitas provides a vocabulary for elegy and meditation on impermanence. A vanitas poem may place ordinary objects in a charged arrangement, allowing decay and radiance to coexist within the same attentive gaze.
Example
Example in poetry:
In John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” beauty is closely linked to transience, a central concern of vanitas art; A vanitas poem may place a skull, extinguished candle, wilted flower, and stopped clock on a table to remind readers of mortality; Shakespeare’s sonnets often use fading beauty and time’s destruction to create vanitas-like reflections; A contemporary vanitas poem might replace old symbols with a dead phone battery, expired calendar, and discarded luxury packaging
Additional Notes
Vanitas is a form of symbolic art centred on mortality, impermanence, and the ultimate insufficiency of worldly achievement or pleasure. Particularly associated with seventeenth-century Dutch still life, it frequently uses skulls, extinguished candles, hourglasses, watches, decaying fruit, wilting flowers, books, instruments, and luxury goods. The name recalls the biblical idea of worldly “vanity”. Poetry often employs the same symbolic vocabulary. Compare memento mori, still life, carpe diem, mortality, transience, skull, hourglass, candle, decay, worldly vanity, and the brevity of life.
Also Known As
Vanitas Painting Memento Mori
Skip to main content