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 G

gleaning

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 act of gathering leftover grain or produce after the main harvest; also used figuratively for gathering small amounts of information or understanding.

Detailed Definition
Gleaning derives from the same root as gleaner and describes the practice itself—the patient gathering of what remains after others have taken the main harvest. In both its literal and figurative senses, gleaning implies working from scarcity, making the most of what is left over, finding value in remnants and margins. Poets use gleaning figuratively to describe their own creative process: gathering images, phrases, and perceptions left behind by experience, assembling a poem from the scattered remainders of attention. This figuration connects poetic composition with one of the humblest agricultural practices, suggesting that poetry arises not from abundance but from patient attention to what others have overlooked. Keats's treatment of gleaning in "To Autumn" elevates the practice to a seasonal ritual of profound beauty.
Example
Example in poetry:
Gleaning as a poetic practice — gathering images, phrases, and perceptions left behind by experience — connects the poet's work to one of the humblest agricultural practices, suggesting that poetry arises from patient attention to what others overlook; The legal right of gleaning — established in biblical law as a duty owed by landowners to the poor — was gradually restricted and finally abolished in England during the enclosure period, and poems about gleaning can carry this history of contested access; A poet might write "what is lyric poetry if not gleaning — the late walk through the stubble field of lived experience, gathering what the main harvest of prose and narrative has left behind"; The Agnes Varda documentary "The Gleaners and I" (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse) connects traditional agricultural gleaning to contemporary urban scavenging and artistic appropriation, a connection that poets exploring waste, reuse, and found materials have found productive; In elegies the gleaning metaphor suggests the poet's work of recovering meaning from the scattered remnants of a life — the few images and phrases that remain after loss has taken the substance, gathered into the small basket of the poem; The seasonal timing of gleaning — after the main harvest, before the plough returns — places it in the transitional moment between abundance and its end, a position that elegiac poetry consistently occupies.
Additional Notes
Gleaning as both practice and metaphor deserves careful attention from students, who should distinguish between its use as a straightforward description of the agricultural practice and its use as a figure for any form of secondary gathering — the collection of what others have overlooked or left behind. In this second sense, gleaning has become a powerful figure for the poet's own activity: gathering images, phrases, and perceptions from the margins of experience, finding value in what the main harvest of prose and narrative has passed over. Students should read Walter Benjamin's concept of the "ragpicker" alongside the gleaning tradition, as both figures represent the recovery of value from waste and remainder. Agnès Varda's documentary film "The Gleaners and I" (2000) is an important contemporary work that explicitly connects agricultural gleaning to artistic appropriation and urban scavenging, and it illuminates the range of the metaphor's application. The temporal position of gleaning — after the main harvest, before the plough returns — places the gleaner (and by extension the poet) in the transitional, between-time that elegiac poetry characteristically inhabits. Related terms: gleaner, reap, sheave, stubble, windrow.
Other Meanings of “gleaning”
Also Known As
leasing leazing picking gathering
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