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 C

coppice

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

Woodland managed by the practice of cutting trees to their stumps to encourage multiple new shoots, providing a sustainable cycle of wood production.

Detailed Definition
Coppice describes both the management practice and the woodland it creates: when trees such as hazel, ash, or chestnut are cut to ground level (coppiced), they produce multiple new stems that can be harvested on rotation—typically seven to fifteen years—for poles, hurdles, charcoal, and firewood. This ancient sustainable woodland management shaped the character of much of the English lowland landscape for millennia. In poetry coppice evokes a particular kind of woodland—multi-stemmed, dense, managed, full of wildlife—that represents the long collaboration between human need and natural growth. The coppice stool—the ancient root system from which new growth perpetually springs—is itself a powerful image of renewal, resilience, and the capacity for regeneration after cutting.
Example
Example in poetry:
Coppice management — the ancient practice of cutting trees to stumps to generate multiple new stems — provides poetry with one of its most powerful images of renewal: the stump that generates new life after being cut; A poet might write "like coppiced hazel after the axe, grief sent up new shoots from the old root — not the original tree, but life persisting from the same ancient source"; John Clare describes coppice woodland with botanical precision, attending to the specific communities of plants that develop under coppice management — the ground flora that thrives in the intervals of light between cutting cycles; The coppice stool — the ancient root system, sometimes centuries old, from which successive crops of poles have been cut — becomes in poetry an image of deep, persistent identity that survives repeated cutting and regeneration; In environmental poetry about the loss of traditional woodland management, the abandoned coppice — its stools overgrown, its structure collapsing — represents the severing of a long relationship between human management and natural growth; The rhythm of coppice management — cut, regrow, cut again, over rotations of seven to twenty years — provides a temporal framework for poems about long cycles of loss and renewal, the individual cutting an episode in a much longer story.
Additional Notes
Coppice is distinguished from similar terms (copse, shaw, spinney, holt) by its emphasis on management practice rather than simply size or location. Students should understand that a coppice is defined by the coppicing technique — the cyclical cutting to stumps — rather than by any intrinsic characteristic of the trees themselves. This management distinction is important for reading poems that use coppice precisely: the word implies not just small woodland but actively managed woodland, the product of a long human-natural collaboration. The coppice stool — the ancient root system from which successive crops of poles are cut — can be hundreds or even thousands of years old, making it one of the most ancient living things in the British landscape and a powerful symbol of resilience and continuity. Students of ecological poetry should note the current revival of interest in coppice management as a sustainable practice, which has generated a body of contemporary verse about traditional woodland management. Related terms: copse, shaw, spinney, holt, boskage.
Also Known As
copse copsewood spinney thicket grove
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