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-time elegy

Form
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

An elegy focused on mortality or decline through harvest imagery

Detailed Definition
Harvest-time elegy is a subgenre of elegiac poetry that uses agricultural imagery—reaping, gleaning, autumnal decay—to meditate on mortality, legacy, or cyclical renewal; it frames death not as finality but as part of a natural rhythm, often consoling through metaphors of sowing and reaping, as in pastoral elegies that link human life to seasonal change and communal labor.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” harvest-time elegy meditates on rural mortality; In Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” harvest-time elegy seeks solace in nature; In Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” harvest-time elegy honors farming lineage; In Tracy K. Smith’s “Wade in the Water,” harvest-time elegy connects labor and spirituals; In Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” harvest-time elegy links tobacco fields to immigrant labor; In Layli Long Soldier’s “38,” harvest-time elegy recounts Dakota land loss.
Additional Notes
A poem of mourning (elegy) specifically focusing on themes of decline, loss, or reflection tied to the conclusion of the growing season or the end of a significant period; often evokes agrarian or cyclical imagery.
Also Known As
harvest elegy autumn lament reaping dirge fall-time elegy Autumnal elegy
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