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.

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 H

Harvest jug

Ceramics
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 harvest jug is a large decorative earthenware pitcher adorned with harvest motifs, used in rural celebrations.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, harvest jugs celebrate agricultural abundance and seasonal ritual through applied decoration. Poets reference them to ground verses in rural life, fertility, and communal thanksgiving, using their forms to evoke plenty, labor, and cyclical time. These jugs enrich themes of sustenance, tradition, and the earth's bounty in domestic poetry. Harvest jugs provide vivid, earthy imagery for explorations of place, community, and seasonal rhythms.
Example
Example in poetry:
The harvest jug — a large slipware or saltglaze jug decorated with harvest scenes, inscriptions, and agricultural motifs — appears in poems about rural England as an emblem of communal celebration and the agrarian year; A poem about the harvest home might describe the jug being brought out "once a year, when the last sheaf was in — the inscription around its belly read by those who could not read, understood by all"; The harvest jug's inscriptions — often verse-like in their form, celebrating labour and plenty — make it a literary object as well as a ceramic one; In a poem about rural decline, the harvest jug survives the agricultural community it once served: "the jug in the farmhouse window, the fields it celebrated sold for housing, the inscription still legible, the harvest gone"; Thomas Hardy's Wessex — where folk custom and agricultural ritual survive into the modern period — is the natural poetic habitat of the harvest jug; A poem about a folk museum's collection might pause at the harvest jug: "the potter's name pressed into the clay, the farmer's name inscribed above the spout — a collaboration between makers and users, both now anonymous."
Additional Notes
The harvest jug is a distinctly English rural ceramic form: a large, robust earthenware or stoneware pitcher decorated with moulded, incised, or slip-trailed images of the harvest — wheat sheaves, ploughs, labourers, inscriptions — and used to carry cider or ale to field workers at harvest time. Many surviving examples from Devon, Somerset, and other West Country counties bear dates and personal inscriptions, making them vivid documents of agricultural life. In poetry, the harvest jug is a powerful emblem of the rural world: labour, community, seasonal abundance, and the ceramic arts of pre-industrial England.
Also Known As
Monkey jug
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