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 W

woe

Archaic Terms
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

Deep sorrow, grief, or misery; profound distress or affliction; also used as an exclamation of lamentation or as a curse wishing misfortune upon someone.

Detailed Definition
“Woe” frames profound lament—“woe is me.” In poetry, it structures tragic address. The term’s simplicity suits universal pain. Poets use it to explore how suffering speaks, where woe marks isolation or divine punishment, reinforcing themes of fate, empathy, and the cry’s power in elegiac and dramatic traditions.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Woe unto him who breaks his vow,” in a prophetic curse; In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “Woe to the hand that shed this blood!”; “She cried ‘Woe!’ and tore her hair”; “Woe is the shadow of pride”; “The land lay in woe after war”; Woe, but hope follows.
Additional Notes
“Woe” functions as exclamation, curse, and state of being; in lament or prophecy, “woe unto thee” invokes divine judgment, while “deep woe” embodies sorrow so profound it becomes identity in tragic modes.
Also Known As
sorrow grief misery alack alas bale Ochone hech Hélas
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