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.

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


Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

Leslie Pinckney Hill Leslie Pinckney Hill

Poet B

John Wesley Holloway John Wesley Holloway
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 75% Poems 84% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Leslie Pinckney Hill

Leslie Pinckney Hill

14 May 1880 – 15 February 1960 (~80)
2 live poems · English

Leslie Pinckney Hill entered the world on May 14, 1880, in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of Samuel H. Hill, a man who had known the brutal chains of enslavement, and Sarah E. Hill. In the shadow of the post-Reconstruction South, where the promises of freedom still clashed with the realities of Jim Crow oppression, young Leslie’s early years were steeped in the rhythms of a family striving for dignity and self-determin…

“The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Tenderness
Listen Timeline Affinities
John Wesley Holloway

John Wesley Holloway

28 July 1865 – 31 October 1935 (~70)
2 live poems · English

John Wesley Holloway was born on July 28, 1865, in Meriwether County, Georgia, just months after the end of the Civil War had shattered the chains of slavery across the American South. He entered a world still raw with the promise and peril of Reconstruction, where the red clay hills hummed with the songs of freedpeople building new lives amid the ruins of plantations. Holloway died on October 31, 1935, in Nashville,…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Leslie Pinckney Hill
John Wesley Holloway
1865 1960
They overlapped for 56 years (1880–1935). When Leslie Pinckney Hill was born, John Wesley Holloway was about 15. Leslie Pinckney Hill was about 55 when John Wesley Holloway died.
Leslie Pinckney Hill in history John Wesley Holloway in history Years they were given

On the map

About 699 km separate Lynchburg, Virginia, USA from Meriwether County, Georgia, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Leslie Pinckney Hill

John Wesley Holloway

Open both on the History Atlas

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

life

Leslie Pinckney Hill only

hill power african self divine education suffering world oppression social beauty poor

John Wesley Holloway only

memory love dream seconds duration

From the biographies

Leslie Pinckney Hill: lynchburg virginia, east orange new jersey, harvard university, booker t. washington, the wings of oppression, cheyney state teachers college, jane ethel clark, the crisis. John Wesley Holloway: meriwether county, nashville tennessee, houston hartsfield holloway, fisk jubilee singers, from the desert, bandanas, clark university, jim crow era.

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

The Teacher
Leslie Pinckney Hill
78% life
Compare
Dream Song
John Wesley Holloway
The Wings of Oppression
Leslie Pinckney Hill
77%
Compare
Dream Song
John Wesley Holloway
The Wings of Oppression
Leslie Pinckney Hill
72%
Compare
Time
John Wesley Holloway
The Teacher
Leslie Pinckney Hill
65% life
Compare
Time
John Wesley Holloway

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'
1884 Oxford English Dictionary Begins Publication
1884 Publication of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
1885 Pasteur Successfully Tests the Rabies Vaccine

Leslie Pinckney Hill

1888 Relocation to East Orange, New Jersey
1898 Graduation from High School
1899 Enrollment at Harvard University
1903 Graduation from Harvard University
1917 First Major Publication
1940 Publication of 'The Poet's Voice'
1945 Awarded the Harmon Foundation Award
1960 Death of Leslie Pinckney Hill

John Wesley Holloway

1884 Education at Atlanta University
1890 Becoming a Minister
1892 Marriage to Mary Holloway
1895 Teaching at a Black School in Georgia
1905 Involvement with the Fisk Jubilee Singers
1910 Friendship with Paul Laurence Dunbar
1913 Publication of 'Songs of the Soil'
1920 Publication of 'The Heart of the South'

Emotional landscapes

Leslie Pinckney Hill: Spirituality, Sorrow, Tenderness. John Wesley Holloway: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.

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