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 M

mow

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 place in a barn where hay or grain is stored; also the act of cutting grass or grain with a scythe or blade.

Detailed Definition
Mow as a noun (rhyming with "cow") derives from Old English "muga," a heap or stack, and refers specifically to the section of a barn designated for storing hay or sheaves. As a verb (rhyming with "go") it describes the act of cutting. In poetry the noun form connects with the image of the barn's dark interior, packed with the year's fodder. The verb, however, carries the stronger poetic charge: to mow is to cut down in swaths, and the phrase "mow down" transfers naturally from scything grain to killing in battle. Andrew Marvell's "The Mower" poems make the mower's action both erotic and fatal, the blade cutting through grass as a figure for desire's destructive power. The word thus operates across domestic, martial, and erotic registers.
Example
Example in poetry:
Marvell's "The Mower" poems make the mowing action central to their erotic and elegiac meaning — the mower who cuts the grass becomes the figure for desire's destructive power, the beautiful field destroyed by the very force that loves it; In Keats's "To Autumn" the act of mowing is past before the poem begins, the mown landscape implicit in the stubble and the gleaned field — the cutting that has already happened creating the conditions for the poem's meditation; A poet might write "he mowed the long grass at the orchard's edge, the scythe's whisper the sound of summer editing itself, reducing the year's excess to the clean possibility of aftermath"; The mow as noun — the place in the barn where hay is stored — provides a domestic, interior counterpart to the field operation, the cut grass preserved in the darkness of the barn as the meadow's harvest is preserved against winter need; Shakespeare's "Full many a glorious morning have I seen" implicitly invokes the mower's action in its description of the sun's rays cut short by cloud — the light mowed down by weather as the mower cuts the standing grass; The scythe as the mower's instrument connects the agricultural action to the Grim Reaper's harvesting of human lives, making every mowing poem potentially an elegy.
Additional Notes
Mow presents students with an important disambiguation challenge: the noun "mow" (rhyming with "cow") meaning a storage place for hay or grain in a barn, and the verb "mow" (rhyming with "go") meaning to cut grass or grain, are distinct words that happen to share a spelling. The noun derives from Old English "muga" (a heap or pile) while the verb derives from Old English "mawan" (to cut). Students should always determine from context which word is operative and should note that the distinction was clearer in earlier texts where pronunciation differences were marked. In poetry, the verb form is more frequently invoked and carries the richer metaphorical range — from the peaceful activity of scything summer grass to the devastating "mowing down" of soldiers in battle. Marvell's "The Mower" poems are the essential texts for the verb's poetic use, where the mower's action is simultaneously erotic and fatal, agricultural and destructive. The noun form appears in poems about barn interiors and winter storage, its dark, hay-scented enclosure providing a characteristically English pastoral atmosphere. Related terms: rick, scythe, sickle, aftermath, windrow.
Also Known As
rick haystack stack hay-mow reap hayloft
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