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 S

sward

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 stretch of land covered with short grass; a grassy turf or lawn, often used to evoke pastoral beauty.

Detailed Definition
Sward derives from Old English "sweard," meaning skin or rind, applied by extension to the surface layer of grass-covered ground. In pastoral and Romantic poetry it conjures images of smooth, unbroken meadows—ideal settings for shepherds, lovers, or contemplative wanderers. Spenser, Milton, and Keats all use sward to paint scenes of verdant repose, where the softness of the word itself mirrors the softness of the ground it names. It differs subtly from "lawn" or "meadow" by emphasizing texture and continuity, the unbroken carpet of green. Poets choose sward when they want to evoke both visual beauty and a sense of ancient, undisturbed nature, making it a cornerstone of the English pastoral tradition.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is set in a landscape of "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" where the sward beneath is felt rather than seen in the darkness — the soft turf as the poem's physical foundation; Marvell's "The Garden" celebrates the sward as the ideal surface for philosophical contemplation — the mind resting on the smooth grass as the body rests on the smooth earth, the green world supporting both; A poet might write "the sward lay between the river and the wood like an offered hand, flat and green and without agenda, the perfect surface for the afternoon's undirected thought"; In pastoral poetry the sward represents the ideal form of the pastoral landscape — the smooth, unbroken, flower-rich grassland that provides the setting for the shepherd's rest, the lover's meeting, and the philosopher's walk; Spenser's "Faerie Queene" sets many of its pastoral interludes on the sward — the green carpet of the idealized landscape that separates the world of action and quest from the world of repose and contemplation; The word's softness — the sibilant opening, the open vowel, the soft final consonant — enacts the quality of the surface it names, the sound of the word performing the texture of the grass.
Additional Notes
Sward is one of the terms where students benefit from understanding the etymology in order to appreciate the word's precise application. Derived from Old English "sweard" (the rind or skin of something), sward specifically refers to the surface layer of turf — the skin of the earth as it were — in a way that distinguishes it from the more general "grass" or "meadow." This dermal metaphor (the earth's skin) is subtly but consistently present in the word's best uses, and students who are aware of it can read sward with greater precision. The word's characteristic sound — soft, smooth, with an open vowel — enacts the quality of the surface it names in a way that "grass" and "turf" do not, and students should attend to this phonaesthetic dimension in their analysis of pastoral verse. Sward appears most frequently in the Spenserian and Miltonic pastoral traditions and in the Romantic nature lyric, where it carries associations of idealized natural landscape that more common alternatives lack. Students should practice substituting sward for grass in their reading and articulating precisely what changes — not merely in register but in the specific image each word creates. Related terms: meadow, herbage, tilth, furrow, leasow.
Also Known As
greensward turf sod grass-sward lawn
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