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

herd

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 large group of animals, especially cattle, kept or moving together; also a person who tends such a group (as in "herdsman").

Detailed Definition
Herd derives from Old English "heord" and functions both as a collective noun for cattle or other large animals and, in older usage, as a term for the person tending them (as in "cowherd" or "shepherd"). In poetry herd carries associations of collective identity, the individual subsumed into the mass—a connotation that has given "the herd" a negative philosophical meaning (following the herd, herd mentality) while its pastoral meaning remains neutral or positive. Classical and biblical pastoralism celebrates the herd as the basis of wealth and sustenance. Milton, Virgil, and Theocritus all center their pastoral worlds on the management of herds, and the social dynamics among herdsmen provide the framework for pastoral dialogue and elegy.
Example
Example in poetry:
The biblical image of the good shepherd who knows each sheep by name contrasts with the herd as the anonymous collective — the individual subsumed into the mass whose loss is noticed only statistically; A poet might write "the herd moved as one creature across the hill, its individual members invisible in the collective motion, the whole expressing a single will that no single animal possessed"; In philosophical poetry the herd carries the negative connotations Nietzsche gave it — the unthinking collective that follows without question — but pastoral poetry resists this condescension by showing the complexity of relationships within a herd and between herd and herdsman; Classical pastoral is organized around herds: Theocritus's goatherds, Virgil's shepherds, the cattle of the Georgics — the herd as the basis of wealth, the subject of daily care, the community of domestic animals that structures the pastoral world; In elegies for pastoral landscapes, the passing of the herd along the drove road or through the village street represents the living abundance of the pre-industrial countryside — the noise, the smell, the visual spectacle of many animals in motion — that mechanized farming has made invisible; Hardy's Wessex poems attend to the herd as a social fact — the convergence point for the labor, anxiety, and satisfaction of agricultural life, the animals that embody the year's investment and the possibility of its loss.
Additional Notes
Herd requires students to navigate between its two distinct grammatical functions: as a collective noun for animals (a herd of cattle) and as an agent noun for the person who tends them (a herdsman or herd). In Old and Middle English, the second sense was common and appears in compound words like "cowherd," "neatherd," and "swineherd" (where "-herd" means the keeper rather than the animals). Students reading medieval texts should be alert to which sense is operative. The philosophical use of "the herd" as a figure for unthinking collective conformity — associated particularly with Nietzsche but present in earlier writing — represents a complete inversion of the pastoral tradition's positive valuation of the herd as the basis of agricultural wealth and the object of pastoral care. Students should note this tension and consider how poems that use "herd" position themselves relative to both the pastoral tradition (herd as abundance, as livelihood, as the object of loving care) and the philosophical critique (herd as conformist mass, as the antithesis of individual excellence). Related terms: drove, fold, neatherd, cowherd, swineherd.
Other Meanings of “herd”
Also Known As
herdsman drover herd-boy herd-keeper drove
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