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 F

fallow

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

Land left unsown for a season to restore its fertility; also describes a pale brownish-yellow color, or a state of dormancy.

Detailed Definition
Fallow comes from Old English "fealh," referring to ploughed but unseeded land resting between crops. In poetry the word operates on two registers simultaneously: the literal agricultural practice of rest and renewal, and the metaphorical state of creative or emotional dormancy. A mind or talent described as lying fallow is not exhausted but waiting, accumulating potential. The color sense—a pale, tawny yellow—adds another poetic dimension, linking fallow fields with the bleached hues of late summer stubble. Poets from Chaucer onward have used fallow to explore themes of patience, latency, and the cyclical rhythms of nature, suggesting that periods of apparent inactivity are in fact essential preconditions for future abundance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats's "To Autumn" is implicitly structured by the agricultural concept of fallow — the season itself as a kind of rest between the year's labor and the next beginning, rich with suspended potential; A poet might write "the field lay fallow in a deliberate idleness, the weeds beginning their slow argument against the plough's last word, the earth remembering what it chose to grow"; Andrew Marvell's contemplative poems explore the fallow state of mind — the garden left to its own devices, the self suspended between action and action — as a condition of unusual receptivity and potential; The color sense of fallow — the pale, tawny yellow of ungrazed stubble or of the tawny fallow deer — adds a visual dimension to the word's temporal and agricultural meaning, a particular shade of late summer or early autumn light; In poems about creative blocks or periods between works, fallow provides the ideal metaphor: not exhaustion but deliberate rest, not failure but the necessary pause between one harvest and the preparation for the next; The agricultural wisdom embedded in fallow — the knowledge that land needs rest to sustain productivity, that fertility cannot be continuously extracted without periodic restoration — translates into a philosophy of creative practice that many poets have found useful and true.
Additional Notes
Fallow is among the most semantically versatile agricultural terms in the English language, and students should master all its dimensions. As an adjective it describes land that has been ploughed but left unsown (allowing weeds to be destroyed and fertility to recover), or land that has been left completely uncultivated. As a noun it describes such land itself. As a color it describes a pale brownish-yellow (as in the fallow deer's coat — tawny, not white). And in its extended metaphorical sense it describes any state of productive dormancy or creative rest. Students should note that all four dimensions can be simultaneously present in sophisticated poetic usage. The agricultural wisdom embedded in fallow — that fertility requires periodic rest, that continuous extraction destroys what it depends on — has made it a particularly resonant metaphor in discourses about creative practice, spiritual development, and ecological sustainability. The fallow period is not failure but preparation; this is the central insight that makes the word so productive metaphorically. Related terms: tilth, tillage, furrow, aftermath.
Other Meanings of “fallow”
Also Known As
fallow land lea ley unploughed ground
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