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

stooks

Farming
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

“Stooks” are groups of cut grain sheaves stood upright in a field to dry before they are gathered and threshed.

Detailed Definition
A stook is a traditional arrangement of harvested cereal sheaves, usually set together so that the grain dries while remaining in the field. In Farming contexts, “stooks” commonly refers to several such groups. In Violet Jacob’s poem, the stooks mark the recently harvested fields and create gaps through which the speaker can glimpse the sea.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Bonnie Joann, Violet Jacob writes: “Gin ye keek whaur the stooks are dividin’ Ye’ll see it atween.” Here, “stooks” means upright groups of harvested sheaves. The speaker looks between them to see the sea, while the quiet, divided fields also help create the poem’s reflective and romantic atmosphere. Earlier, “We’ve stookit the hairst” means “we have arranged the harvest in stooks.”
Additional Notes
“Stooks” is a Scots and agricultural term; the standard English expression is often “sheaves set in shocks” or simply “bundled sheaves.” The related verb stook means to arrange harvested sheaves in this way. In the poem, stookit is the Scots past participle meaning “set in stooks.” A sheaf is a bundle of cut grain; a stook is an arrangement of several sheaves standing together. Stooking allows grain to dry before it is collected for threshing. The word is especially associated with traditional harvesting practices and may sound rural, regional, or old-fashioned in modern English.
Also Known As
Harvest Bundles Sheaves
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