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 D

drove

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 group of animals, especially cattle or sheep, being herded together; also a road along which animals were traditionally driven to market.

Detailed Definition
Drove derives from Old English "draf," from "drïfan" (to drive), and describes both a herd or flock in motion and the ancient trackways—droveroads—along which livestock were moved across country to seasonal pastures or markets. In poetry drove evokes the movement and noise of large groups of animals, the dust of summer roads, the calls of drovers. The historical network of droveways that crossed Britain before railways represents an entire vanished infrastructure, and when poets invoke drove roads or droves, they reach back to a pre-industrial landscape of seasonal migration and traditional practice. The word also carries a democratic energy—the multitude in motion—that distinguishes it from the more static images of fold and pen.
Example
Example in poetry:
The drove roads of Britain — ancient trackways along which cattle and sheep were moved from highland summer pastures to lowland winter farms or to market — represent a vanished geography of seasonal movement; A poet might write "they took the old drove road south in October, the beasts filling the hollow way from bank to bank, the dust rising like a brown season"; In pastoral poetry the drove represents movement and temporary communities — the social world of drovers, their dogs, their overnight stops at inns — as distinct from the settled, rooted world of the farm; Hardy's Wessex poems attend to the drove roads as features of the landscape that carry historical depth — paths worn by centuries of animal movement that persist in the topography long after the practice that created them has ceased; The biblical resonance of the drove — the movement of flocks and herds as evidence of pastoral wealth — connects English droving poetry to a much older tradition of celebrating the abundance of animals in motion; The noise and dust and sheer physical mass of a drove — hundreds of animals moving together, filling a road from hedge to hedge — provides a powerful visual and auditory image available to poets who want to convey the scale and vitality of pre-industrial pastoral economy.
Additional Notes
Drove is important for understanding a dimension of pre-industrial rural life that has left its mark on the British landscape but is largely invisible in contemporary experience: the movement of large numbers of animals on foot across country to seasonal pastures or markets. The network of drove roads — wide, unfenced tracks along which cattle, sheep, pigs, and geese were moved — constituted a major infrastructure of the pre-railway economy. Students should know that droving was a distinct trade: drovers were specialists who contracted to move animals across country, often over hundreds of miles, sleeping rough and managing the animals' pace to deliver them in saleable condition. The physical evidence of drove roads — their width (often forty feet or more), their traditional wayside inns, their characteristic course avoiding toll roads — persists in the British landscape. For students of Victorian and later rural poetry, the drove road is one of the features of the pre-industrial landscape that Hardy and others invoke to suggest historical depth. Related terms: herd, fold, pen, neatherd, swineherd.
Also Known As
droveway drover's road drift cattle road herd
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