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 L

leasow

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

A pasture or meadow; an archaic and dialectal English term for grassland used for grazing, particularly in the West Midlands.

Detailed Definition
Leasow (also "leasowe" or "leasow") derives from Old English "laes" (pasture) and describes a pasture or area of grassland—essentially synonymous with "meadow" or "pasture" but carrying specific regional and historical associations with the West Midlands of England. The word appears in local place names and in the work of poets engaged with specific regional landscapes. Its archaic and regional character makes it a marker of authenticity and local knowledge in poetry: to use leasow rather than pasture signals an intimacy with a particular area and its linguistic traditions. In the context of enclosure history, leasows were among the common pastures whose privatization most directly affected the rural poor, giving the word potential political charge when deployed in verse about agricultural transformation.
Example
Example in poetry:
The leasow as a West Midlands term for pasture carries regional linguistic identity as part of its meaning — to use leasow rather than pasture or meadow is to speak from a specific place and linguistic tradition; A poet might write "the leasow lay quiet under the June afternoon, the cattle hardly moving in the deep grass, the entire field enclosed in its own unhurried time"; In the history of enclosure in the West Midlands, leasows were among the common pastures privatized and taken out of communal use — the loss of the leasow a local instance of the general destruction of common rights; John Clare's engagement with the specific vocabulary of his own region suggests the kind of linguistic rootedness that leasow represents — the poet who uses the word their community uses for a familiar landscape feature rather than the standardized literary term; The word's relative obscurity — even educated readers may not know it — creates a slight productive defamiliarization: the reader must pause, must acknowledge the existence of a word and a relationship to landscape they did not previously know; In contemporary poetry about regional identity and the survival of local knowledge, leasow appears as an example of the vocabulary that encodes a community's specific relationship to its own landscape.
Additional Notes
Leasow is one of the rarest terms in this vocabulary outside the West Midlands region, and its appearance in a poem is almost always a deliberate signal of regional identity and linguistic specificity. Students should understand that the value of dialect terms like leasow is not merely coloristic but constitutes a claim about who has the right to name a landscape — the community that lives and works in it using their own inherited vocabulary, not the standardized literary language that tends toward the general and the universal. Students interested in the politics of pastoral poetry should consider how the choice between leasow and meadow, or brimble and bramble, or bield and shelter, reflects broader questions about whose language and whose experience poetry takes as its authoritative reference point. The West Midlands distribution of leasow makes it specifically associated with the landscape of the English Midlands — the mixed farming country between the Welsh borders and the Midland plain — and students reading poetry from this region should be alert to its use. The word's legal dimension (leasow as a pasture right as well as a physical space) connects it to the cluster of common-rights vocabulary. Related terms: meadow, sward, herbage, pasturage, agistment.
Also Known As
leasowe pasture meadow grassland ley
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