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

Jessie R. Fauset Jessie R. Fauset

Poet B

Joshua Henry Jones Joshua Henry Jones
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 70% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jessie R. Fauset

Jessie R. Fauset

27 April 1882 – 30 April 1961 (~79)
1 live poem · English

Jessie Redmon Fauset entered the world on April 27, 1882, in the small community of Fredericksville—now known as Lawnside—in Camden County, New Jersey. She was the seventh child born to Redmon Fauset, a respected African Methodist Episcopal minister, and his wife Annie Seamon Fauset. Tragedy struck early when Annie died while Jessie was still a young girl, leaving a void that her father filled with unwavering devotio…

“I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of 'thou shall not.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
Joshua Henry Jones

Joshua Henry Jones

1876 – 14 December 1955 (~79)
2 live poems · English

Joshua Henry Jones Jr. was born in 1876 in the sun-baked fields of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a place still echoing with the fragile hopes of Reconstruction. He died on December 14, 1955, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-nine, his life a remarkable arc that carried him from the segregated South to the bustling intellectual and political circles of New England. A poet, novelist, composer, journalist, a…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Nature Poets, Poet-Musicians, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Jessie R. Fauset
Joshua Henry Jones
1876 1961
They overlapped for 74 years (1882–1955). When Jessie R. Fauset was born, Joshua Henry Jones was about 6. Jessie R. Fauset was about 73 when Joshua Henry Jones died.
Jessie R. Fauset in history Joshua Henry Jones in history Years they were given

On the map

About 921 km separate Fredericksville, New Jersey, USA from Orangeburg, South Carolina, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Jessie R. Fauset

Joshua Henry Jones

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

african

Jessie R. Fauset only

mother stars truth crisis harlem slavery

Joshua Henry Jones only

skull life world landscape shrub lane pastoral imaginative nature

From the biographies

racial

Jessie R. Fauset: fredericksville, lawnside, camden county, m. carey thomas, cornell university, the crisis, w.e.b. du bois, there is confusion. Joshua Henry Jones: orangeburg, south carolina, boston, helen courtney, the heart of the world, dear old boston, james michael curley, poems of the four seas.

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.

Oriflamme
Jessie R. Fauset
66% african
Compare
To a Skull
Joshua Henry Jones
Oriflamme
Jessie R. Fauset
60%
Compare
Questing
Joshua Henry Jones

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

Jessie R. Fauset

1900 Graduation from Philadelphia High School for Girls
1905 Graduation from Cornell University
1919 Marriage to Herbert Harris
1920 Relocation to Paris
1924 Publication of 'There Is Confusion'
1929 Publication of 'Plum Bun'
1931 Publication of 'The Chinaberry Tree'
1935 Publication of 'The Poems of Jessie R. Fauset'

Joshua Henry Jones

1885 Early Education and Influence in Orangeburg
1898 Graduation from Wilberforce University
1901 Marriage to Mary E. Jones
1915 Publication of First Poetry Collection
1920 Move to Boston, Massachusetts
1940 Publication in Anthologies
1945 Involvement in Civil Rights Advocacy
1950 Final Years and Legacy

Emotional landscapes

Jessie R. Fauset: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Joshua Henry Jones: Wonder, Longing, Peace.

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