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 H

herbage

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

Grass and other plants used as pasture for grazing animals; also a legal right to graze animals on another's land.

Detailed Definition
Herbage derives from Old French "herbage," from "herbe" (grass), and means both the collective vegetation—grass, herbs, and low plants—available as fodder for grazing animals, and the customary right to graze animals on another's land. As a legal term it is related to pannage and turbary as one of the traditional common rights; as a descriptive term it encompasses the lush variety of a well-managed meadow or pasture. In poetry herbage evokes the sensory richness of grassy landscapes—the diversity of species, the smell of warm grass in summer, the sound of feeding animals. It also suggests abundance and natural provision: the earth's spontaneous offering of nourishment. Spenser and other pastoral poets use herbage to paint the fertility of idealized pastoral landscapes, the ground itself generous and responsive to the animals that browse upon it.
Example
Example in poetry:
Herbage as both a material reality and a legal concept gives it unusual range: the actual vegetation of a meadow — its diversity of species, its seasonal rhythms — and the customary right to graze it connect the poetic and the political; A poet might write "the herbage gave itself without asking — clover, vetch, plantain, fescue, a democracy of species that the grazing animals consumed without discrimination, each bite a lesson in equality"; Virgil's Eclogues celebrate herbage as the spontaneous gift of the pastoral landscape — the earth offering food to animals without the labor of ploughing and sowing that arable farming requires, a figure for natural abundance prior to human toil; In poems about the loss of traditional meadows to agricultural improvement — their flower-rich herbage replaced by monocultures of rye-grass — the word carries elegiac weight, naming what has been lost along with the visual and biological richness of the unimproved meadow; The legal right of herbage — the commoner's ability to graze animals on another's land by custom — connects to the broader struggle over access to the countryside that informs much English rural poetry from Clare onward; The sensory richness of herbage — its smell in summer heat, the sound of bees working through it, the visual complexity of a meadow full of different species — makes it one of pastoral poetry's most reliable repositories of natural abundance.
Additional Notes
Herbage operates simultaneously as a poetic description of vegetation and as a legal term for grazing rights, and students should be practiced at reading both dimensions when they appear. As a descriptive term, herbage encompasses the entire community of low-growing plants in a meadow or pasture — grasses, clovers, vetches, plantains, and all the other species that make up the complex flora of an unimproved grassland. This descriptive richness makes it preferable to the more generic "grass" in poems that want to evoke the biodiversity of traditional meadow landscapes. As a legal term, herbage (the right of herbage) describes the customary right to graze animals on another's land — one of the bundle of common rights that sustained the rural poor. Students studying enclosure poetry should understand how the loss of herbage rights affected the rural community's relationship to the land. The word's French origin gives it a slightly elevated register compared to "grass" or "fodder," which is part of its appeal to poets seeking to dignify the pastoral landscape. Related terms: pasturage, agistment, pannage, estovers, turbary.
Also Known As
pasturage grass rights pasture grazing verdure
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