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 R

reap

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

To cut and gather a crop, especially grain, at harvest time; broadly, to gather the results of one's efforts or actions.

Detailed Definition
Reap derives from Old English "ripan" and is one of the most metaphorically rich terms in English poetry. The Pauline maxim "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" established reaping as the definitive image of consequence—moral, spiritual, and natural. Keats's "To Autumn" celebrates the act of reaping as part of the season's abundant fulfillment, while elsewhere the "grim reaper" transforms the harvester's action into the defining metaphor of death. This double valence—harvest as both fulfillment and ending—gives reap an unusual emotional range in verse. Its monosyllabic bluntness suits poetry's need for concentrated impact, making it one of the most frequently employed agricultural terms across all periods of English literature.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" — Paul's epistle to the Galatians establishes the harvest metaphor as the foundational image of moral consequence, the reaping that follows inevitably from the sowing; Keats personifies autumn as the season of reaping — the "close bosom-friend of the maturing sun," watching "the last oozings hours by hours" in a landscape where the harvest is the year's primary event; A poet might write "she reaped what thirty years of silence had sown — not bitterness, as she had feared, but a strange clean emptiness like a harvested field, ready for the next season's argument with the earth"; The Grim Reaper — Death as the harvester who cuts down human lives as the farmer cuts grain — is the most pervasive metaphor derived from the agricultural action of reaping, connecting the agricultural and the existential; Shelley's political poetry uses the reaping metaphor to describe the revolutionary harvest — the long-oppressed rising to reap the consequences that tyranny has sown, the violent harvest of justice overdue; In elegies the reaping metaphor allows poets to frame death as natural completion rather than arbitrary destruction — the life ripened and gathered, the harvest complete, the field now empty but ready for renewal.
Additional Notes
Reap is one of the agricultural terms most thoroughly embedded in the moral vocabulary of English through its biblical use, and students should understand this embeddedness before attempting to trace the word's more specifically agricultural uses. The Pauline principle — "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Galatians 6:7) — established reaping as the universal image of moral consequence, and this usage has so dominated the word's metaphorical life that most modern users are unaware of its agricultural specificity. Students should practice recovering the agricultural precision behind the moral metaphor: to reap is not merely to receive consequences but to cut, gather, and carry in the specific actions of harvest. The Grim Reaper's personification of death as harvest — cutting down human lives as the farmer cuts grain — is another pervasive metaphorical use that students should be able to trace to its agricultural origin. Keats's "To Autumn" and its celebration of the reaping season should be read as the counter-weight to these darker uses, recovering the harvest's positive associations of fulfilled abundance. Related terms: sickle, sheave, gleaner, stubble, aftermath.
Also Known As
harvest mow cut garner gather
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