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

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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 74% Poems 81% Blended 77%
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…

“Nothing in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Tenderness
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

Leslie Pinckney Hill
Joshua Henry Jones
1876 1960
They overlapped for 76 years (1880–1955). When Leslie Pinckney Hill was born, Joshua Henry Jones was about 4. Leslie Pinckney Hill was about 75 when Joshua Henry Jones died.
Leslie Pinckney Hill in history Joshua Henry Jones in history Years they were given

On the map

About 463 km separate Lynchburg, Virginia, USA from Orangeburg, South Carolina, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Leslie Pinckney Hill

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 life world

Leslie Pinckney Hill only

hill power self divine education suffering oppression social beauty poor

Joshua Henry Jones only

skull landscape shrub lane pastoral imaginative nature

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. 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.

The Teacher
Leslie Pinckney Hill
73% african, life
Compare
To a Skull
Joshua Henry Jones
The Wings of Oppression
Leslie Pinckney Hill
71%
Compare
To a Skull
Joshua Henry Jones
The Wings of Oppression
Leslie Pinckney Hill
70% world
Compare
Questing
Joshua Henry Jones
The Teacher
Leslie Pinckney Hill
63%
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

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

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

Leslie Pinckney Hill: Spirituality, Sorrow, Tenderness. Joshua Henry Jones: Wonder, Longing, Peace.

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