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 S

Sheugh

Dialect
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 ditch, trench, or drainage channel; a common feature of the worked Scottish landscape.

Detailed Definition
"Sheugh" is an emphatically unglamorous word for an unglamorous feature of the agricultural landscape, yet it appears in Scots poetry as evidence of the tradition's willingness to include the unbeautiful and the practical. Burns and later poets use such words to insist on the full reality of the rural world, not just its pastoral beauty but its drainage and its labour. The word's unusual phonology — that initial "sh" followed by "ugh" — makes it memorably expressive, a small comic masterpiece of sound suggesting wet earth.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Sheugh" means a ditch, trench, or small drainage channel; A poet might write: "The horse lay deid in the cold sheugh — / a sight that said the winter's rough." uses the word for rural tragedy; "He cast his letter in the sheugh — / some words are better gone enough." dramatises an act of erasure; "The sheugh ran full wi' autumn rain — / the fields drank deep and breathed again." places the word in agricultural context; "Past sheugh and dyke the soldier came — / and nane who saw him looked the same." uses the landscape as a veteran's return; "The bairns sailed boats in the sheugh's slow flow — / the whole world bounded by a row." makes childhood poetry from a ditch
Additional Notes
Sheugh is a word rooted in the working landscape — the drainage ditches that are as fundamental a feature of improved Scottish farmland as walls and hedges. In verse it grounds a poem firmly in agricultural reality, and its unlovely sound fits an unlovely but essential feature of the landscape. In narrative and comic verse, the "sheugh" is a hazard — characters fall into sheughs, cattle blunder into them, illicit lovers hide in them. In contemporary usage it has broadened slightly, but its agricultural origin remains present. For students, "sheugh" is a reminder of how Scots poetry is deeply embedded in the physical realities of land use, farming, and the worked landscape rather than an idealised pastoral fantasy.
Also Known As
Ditch Trench Furrow
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