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 B

Barley

Flora
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 hardy cereal grain with long awns, symbolizing humility, sustenance, and rustic life.

Detailed Definition
Barley represents the humble staple of common life in poetry, contrasting with wheat’s nobility. Used in bread and beer, it signifies communal joy and resilience. Poets reference it to evoke pastoral simplicity, the dignity of labor, and the quiet abundance of the earth.
Example
Example in poetry:
In “The Song of the Barley,” traditional Scottish verse celebrates barley as sustenance and symbol of harvest: “Barley bends but does not break”; Robert Burns references barley in “John Barleycorn” as a personification of resilience through seasons of death and rebirth; Barley fields evoke pastoral peace in Wordsworthian poetry: “Golden barley rippled like a slow river”; Modern food-poets link barley to ancestral farming: “Grandfather’s hands knew barley’s weight and worth”; In ritual poetry, barley signifies fertility and offering; Its straw inspires humble metaphors: “Wisdom grows in barley fields, not marble halls.”
Additional Notes
Barley, one of the first domesticated grains, appears in pastoral and agrarian poetry as a symbol of sustenance, humility, and cyclical time; in Keats’s “To Autumn,” it represents harvest’s quiet dignity; contrast with wheat for nuanced class or labor commentary; barley’s golden fields also serve as visual metaphors for aging or ripening.
Other Meanings of “Barley”
Also Known As
Pearl Barley Hulled Barley barleycorn
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