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

sickle

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 short-handled tool with a curved blade used for cutting grain or grass; a symbol of harvest and, by extension, of death.

Detailed Definition
Sickle comes from Old English "sicol," derived from Latin "secula," and describes the crescent-bladed hand tool central to pre-industrial harvesting. Its curved shape associates it visually with the crescent moon, and poets have long exploited this connection to link agricultural cycles with lunar rhythms and seasonal death. The sickle is the instrument of the Grim Reaper, transforming a practical farming tool into the universal symbol of mortality. In pastoral poetry it represents both the bounty of harvest and its dark corollary—the cutting down of what has grown. Keats, Gray, and countless earlier poets use the sickle to hold these meanings in tension, celebrating abundance while acknowledging that all growth culminates in being cut.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Grim Reaper's sickle — the crescent blade that cuts down human lives as the farmer's sickle cuts grain — is the most pervasive metaphor derived from this agricultural tool, connecting the harvest of food to the harvest of lives; Keats's "To Autumn" implies the sickle through its imagery of reaping and gleaning — the cutting has been done, the season's work accomplished with the blade that is the harvest's primary instrument; A poet might write "the sickle went through the standing barley with a sound like tearing paper, each stroke a brief violence that cleared a small arc of abundance and left the bare stubble behind"; The crescent shape of the sickle — its blade curved like the new moon — connects it to lunar cycles and feminine mythology: the sickle as the moon goddess's instrument, the harvest as a lunar as well as solar event; In political poetry the sickle appears as the communist movement's emblem, the agricultural worker's tool paired with the industrial worker's hammer — but beneath the ideological deployment lies the actual agricultural implement and its history of use by generations of harvesters; Burns, who harvested his own fields, describes the sickle with the respect of a man who has used it, his attention to the quality of the blade and the technique of its use distinguishing his agricultural verse from the pastoral poetry of those who observed farming from a comfortable distance.
Additional Notes
Sickle is one of the agricultural terms that has accumulated the richest and most diverse set of cultural associations across different traditions, and students should be prepared to navigate this complexity in their reading. The three main associative domains are: the harvest (the tool's primary agricultural function, celebrated in pastoral and georgic verse); death (the Grim Reaper's instrument, making every sickle simultaneously a harvesting tool and a mortality symbol); and political revolution (the hammer and sickle as the emblem of communism, representing the alliance of industrial and agricultural workers). Students should determine which associative domain is primarily operative in any given poem while remaining alert to the others. The sickle's crescent shape — its blade curved like the new or waning moon — connects it to lunar mythology and the feminine principle in several traditions, and students interested in gender and the pastoral should note how the sickle's associations differ from those of the more masculine plough and harrow. The scythe (a larger, long-handled tool for bulk mowing) and the sickle (smaller, short-handled, for precise reaping) should be carefully distinguished. Related terms: reap, mow, sheave, gleaner, stubble.
Other Meanings of “sickle”
Also Known As
reaping hook hook bagging hook grass-hook
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