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

bramble

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

The thorny shrub (Rubus fruticosus) that produces blackberries; any thorny or prickly shrub; a characteristic plant of hedgerows and woodland edges.

Detailed Definition
Bramble derives from Old English "bremel" and describes the vigorous, arching, thorny shrub of the genus Rubus that produces blackberries in autumn—one of Britain's most familiar wild fruits. In poetry bramble serves multiple functions: it is an image of wild fecundity (the abundant black fruit), of painful obstruction (the thorns that tear the gathering hand), and of the hedgerow as a particular ecosystem—the dense, complex boundary between fields that shelters birds and small mammals. The act of blackberry picking, moving along bramble-choked hedgerows in late summer, is a childhood experience common enough across British culture to carry nostalgic weight. Poets from Clare to Heaney have described this combination of pleasure and pain—the reward of sweet fruit balanced against scratched skin—as a compressed image of nature's simultaneous generosity and indifference.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats describes autumn as a season of fruitful excess that includes the bramble-fruit's final ripening — the blackberry among the gifts of the dying year before winter claims the hedgerow; Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking" is the most celebrated bramble poem in twentieth-century English, the childhood joy of gathering fruit turning into an elegy for the impossibility of preserving pleasure: "each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not"; A poet might write "the bramble kept its fruit behind its thorns, as if to test the worthiness of those who reached for sweetness through the pain"; In pastoral verse the bramble's dual nature — the sweet fruit and the tearing thorn — makes it a natural image for any experience that combines pleasure with its necessary cost, any reward that demands a price; John Clare describes the bramble with botanical precision in his nature poems, naming it among the plants of the hedgerow and scrubland with the affectionate accuracy of a man who has spent his life in their company; The bramble as boundary plant — growing thickest in hedgerows and at field margins — gives it an association with the liminal space between cultivated and wild land, the border zone where the ordered world of agriculture meets unmanaged nature.
Additional Notes
Bramble is one of the most extensively used plants in English nature poetry, appearing from medieval verse to the present. Students should distinguish between bramble's appearance in three distinct poetic traditions: the pastoral-elegiac (the hedgerow plant of the English countryside as it has been), the mythological-symbolic (the thorns and fruit as combined image of pain and pleasure, desire and its cost), and the precisely naturalistic (the botanical accuracy of Clare, Heaney, and others). Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking" is the essential modern bramble poem and should be read by all students of this tradition. The bramble's dual character — protective thorns surrounding sweet fruit — has attracted poets working with paradox, from religious verse about spiritual reward requiring suffering to erotic verse about love's painful pleasures. Students should also note that bramble belongs to the genus Rubus, which includes dozens of microspecies in Britain, and that botanically aware poets like Clare often distinguish between specific types. Compare with "brimble" for the dialectal variant.
Also Known As
briar blackberry bush brier bramblewood Blackberry brimble
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