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

croft

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 small, enclosed field or piece of arable land, especially one attached to a house; particularly associated with Scottish and northern English farming.

Detailed Definition
Croft derives from Old English "croft," denoting a small enclosed plot of land, and remains in active use in Scotland where crofting describes a traditional system of smallholder agriculture. In poetry it conveys a sense of modest, self-sufficient rural life—the intimate scale of farming on the margins of larger estates or wild landscapes. Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" uses croft to evoke the quiet dignity of coastal village life. The word's smallness is part of its poetic value: a croft is not a grand estate but a human-scaled space where a family's entire livelihood might be concentrated, making it an ideal image for poems about humble virtue, endurance, and attachment to the land.
Example
Example in poetry:
Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" is set partly in the world of the small croft — the modest, enclosed holding of a coastal village — whose modest scale concentrates the poem's emotional weight on the domestic and the particular; A Scottish poet might write "the croft held everything a life required — the house, the kailyard, the field for oats, the hill grazing beyond — a world entire in five acres"; The croft's smallness is part of its poetic significance: the entire economy of a family concentrated in a space that a strong person could walk around in minutes, making it an image of both sufficiency and vulnerability; In poems about the Highland Clearances, the croft stands as the central image of what was lost — not just a house but an entire way of life organized around the small holding, the particular relationship to a particular piece of ground; Contemporary Scottish poetry continues to draw on the croft as a symbol of cultural identity and resistance — the small self-sufficient holding as an alternative to the economies of scale that have transformed modern agriculture; The croft's enclosure — its hedge or dyke separating it from the common land — makes it an image of the private within the communal, the family's particular claim within the shared landscape of the township.
Additional Notes
Croft carries particular importance for understanding the social geography of British rural history, especially in Scotland where crofting remains a living tradition with legal protections. Students should distinguish between the English use (a small enclosed field, typically attached to a cottage, primarily arable) and the Scottish use (the entire smallholding system of house, field strips, and hill grazing that constitutes a croft in the Highland tradition). For students of the Highland Clearances, the croft is the central image of what was destroyed — not merely property but an entire system of social organization, cultural transmission, and relationship to the land. The legal formula "toft and croft" (house site and attached field) appears in medieval English conveyances and connects croft to the broader vocabulary of medieval land tenure. Students should also note the word's appearance in English place names (particularly in areas of Viking settlement) as evidence of the long history of this type of smallholding. Related terms: toft, messuage, demesne, glebe.
Also Known As
smallholding enclosure small farm toft field
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