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.

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

Counter-pastoral

Genre
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 poetic genre that critiques or overturns idealized pastoral conventions by exposing rural hardship, ecological degradation, or social injustice beneath idyllic surfaces.

Detailed Definition
Counter-pastoral poetry subverts idyllic rural imagery by exposing labor, decay, or ecological damage beneath the bucolic surface; it critiques romanticized nature tropes, as in Frost’s darker pastorals or contemporary eco-poetry confronting climate crisis.
Example
Example in poetry:
Counter-pastoral appears in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” where rural labor undermines idyllic myth; In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Randall Jarrell shatters pastoral innocence with war; Sylvia Plath’s “Sheep in Fog” presents landscape as ominous, not restorative; Wendell Berry’s “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” critiques industrial agriculture through anti-pastoral; Contemporary poet Natalie Diaz uses counter-pastoral in “Postcolonial Love Poem” to reclaim desert landscapes.
Additional Notes
Counter-pastoral challenges idealized rural imagery by depicting nature as harsh, indifferent, or exploited; it critiques Romantic escapism and aligns with eco-critical or postcolonial perspectives.
Also Known As
Anti-pastoral urban pastoral inverted pastoral ironic pastoral
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