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meadow

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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 field of grass, especially one used for hay production or grazing; a fundamental image of pastoral beauty in English poetry.

Detailed Definition
Meadow derives from Old English "mædwe," the oblique form of "mæd," and describes grassland that is managed primarily for hay production—cut in summer and grazed in autumn and winter—as opposed to permanent pasture that is grazed throughout the season. In poetry meadow is one of the richest and most frequently employed landscape words: it evokes specific sensory qualities (the long grass, the diversity of wildflowers, the sound of insects, the smell of summer), a particular human relationship to the land (management without ploughing), and a tradition of pastoral association stretching from Theocritus and Virgil through Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Marvell, Keats, and beyond. Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" makes the meadow a complex philosophical landscape, while countless lyric poems use it as the setting for love, contemplation, and elegiac loss.
Example
Example in poetry:
Marvell's "The Mower Against Gardens" and companion poems make the meadow the site of philosophical and erotic complexity — the mower in his meadow a figure for desire, mortality, and the relationship between natural and cultivated beauty; Keats's "To Autumn" moves through the meadow landscape with the season's characteristic abundance — the flowers, the bees, the soft dying light — making the meadow a space where time seems simultaneously to stand still and to accelerate toward its end; A poet might write "the meadow in June was a democracy of species, no single plant dominant, each one finding its proportion of the light, the whole more beautiful than any of its parts"; In elegies for the traditional English meadow — its flower-rich grassland replaced by improved pastures of rye-grass — the meadow becomes an image of lost biological and visual diversity, the plurality of species reduced to the monoculture of agricultural efficiency; Wordsworth situates many of his encounters with natural beauty in meadow landscapes, the open grassland providing the space for both physical freedom and contemplative thought that his poetry requires; The meadow's temporal character — it exists in the pause between mowing, its richness accumulating in the interval between cuttings — gives it an association with the between-time, the space of suspended potential that precedes the next decisive action.
Additional Notes
Meadow is one of the most extensively theorized landscape terms in English literary criticism, and students should be familiar with the main scholarly accounts of its use in the pastoral tradition. Raymond Williams's "The Country and the City" provides an essential framework for understanding how meadow and similar pastoral images function ideologically — as representations of a social order that naturalizes hierarchy and conceals the labor that produces the landscape's beauty. Students should read this alongside the primary texts to develop a critical awareness of what the meadow image includes and excludes. Technically, students should distinguish meadow (hay meadow, managed primarily for hay production and cut once or twice a year) from pasture (grazed continuously) and from the more general "field" — the precision matters because it determines the landscape's appearance and its relationship to different agricultural operations. The species-rich hay meadow — with its diversity of wildflowers, grasses, and invertebrate life — is one of Britain's most threatened habitats, and contemporary ecological poetry about the loss of traditional meadows gives the word new urgency. Related terms: sward, herbage, pasturage, leasow, swale.
Other Meanings of “meadow”
Also Known As
mead meado water-meadow lea ley leasow glade leaze
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