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.

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 W

Wattle And Daub

Architecture
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

Wattle and daub is a wall-building method using woven branches coated with clay, mud, or plaster. It can evoke handmade shelter and vulnerable endurance.

Detailed Definition
Wattle and daub joins flexible woven wood with earth-based coating to make walls from local, ordinary materials. In poetry, it can symbolize dwellings built through improvisation, communal skill, and closeness to the land. Its apparent fragility is balanced by its long history of use, making it fitting for poems about rural memory, poverty, resilience, or the ways human shelter depends upon humble materials shaped by many hands.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The wattle and daub walls breathed dust and smoke,” grounding a rural childhood poem in traditional building materials; A poet may use wattle and daub to contrast a fragile cottage with a modern concrete city; “Rain worried the daub from its woven frame,” letting the construction method suggest poverty or decay; In an ancestral poem, “our names were sealed in wattle and daub,” connecting handmade walls with family memory
Additional Notes
Wattle and daub is an ancient, widespread building technique: flexible sticks or reeds are woven into a framework, then coated with a mixture of clay, soil, straw, lime, or plaster. Because it is made from local materials and requires repair, it can suggest intimacy, improvisation, poverty, ecological knowledge, or endurance despite exposure. In poems, emphasize texture: woven twigs, cracked mud, handprints, rain damage. Compare it with timber framing, adobe, cob, and plaster.
Also Known As
Wattle-and-Daub Mud and Stud
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