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

litter

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

Straw or other plant material spread on the floor of an animal's quarters for bedding; also a group of young animals born at one time.

Detailed Definition
Litter derives from Old French "litiere" (bed, litter) and in agricultural use describes the bedding spread on stable or byre floors to keep animals clean, warm, and comfortable. The connection between this sense and the modern meaning of scattered rubbish is direct: litter is material spread across a floor or ground. In poetry litter's agricultural sense evokes the care taken of working and productive animals—the daily spreading of fresh straw, the removal of soiled material—suggesting the intimacy and attentiveness of the relationship between farmer and animal. The secondary meaning—a group of young animals born together—gives litter a different kind of poetic value: the simultaneous proliferation of life, the abundant, helpless vulnerability of multiple newborns that in pastoral verse represents spring's generous overflow of new life.
Example
Example in poetry:
The litter in the stable — the straw spread on the floor for animals to lie on — appears in nativity poetry as the material context for the most significant birth in Christian theology, the God of the universe laid in the hay and straw of the manger; A poet might write "she changed the litter in the stall each morning, the fresh straw a small renewal, the animal's comfort a daily act of care that required nothing but the willingness to do it again"; In poems about the intimate relationship between farmers and their animals, the daily spreading of litter — the attention to the comfort of creatures in one's care — represents a form of love expressed not in words but in repeated practical action; The litter of young animals — a litter of piglets, of puppies, of kittens — provides a different poetic image: the simultaneous arrival of multiple vulnerable lives, the mother surrounded by her young, the prolific abundance of mammalian reproduction; The connection between the bedding sense and the scattered-rubbish sense of litter is available to poets: the straw spread on the stable floor is not disorder but a considered arrangement, while litter in the modern sense is the same material displaced from its purpose and meaning; Contemporary farm poets attend to litter as part of the daily physical care that sustains animal life — the unglamorous but essential maintenance work that pastoral idealization tends to omit.
Additional Notes
Litter presents students with a valuable opportunity to trace how an agricultural word has evolved into its modern dominant sense while retaining its original meaning in specific contexts. The agricultural litter (bedding for animals) and the modern litter (scattered rubbish) are directly connected: both describe material scattered across a surface — in one case deliberately and for a purpose, in the other accidentally and wastefully. The word's third main sense (a group of young animals born at one time) derives from the bedding sense — the young animals are born in and share the same litter of straw. Students should consider how the three senses interact in poetic contexts: a poem about a litter of piglets in a straw-filled pen operates with all three meanings available simultaneously. The nativity context — the infant Christ born in a manger, lying in the straw of the stable floor — invokes litter in its agricultural sense and gives it theological resonance: the divine laid in the animal bedding, the sacred hidden in the mundane. Students should trace the semantic history of litter as a model for how agricultural vocabulary generates new meanings through metaphorical extension. Related terms: byre, stall, fold, rick, thatch.
Other Meanings of “litter”
Also Known As
bedding straw bedding bracken-litter mulch farrow Palanquin
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