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 B

bondsmen

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

“Bondsmen” is an archaic plural noun meaning men held in bondage, especially enslaved men or men legally bound to serve another.

Detailed Definition
In historical and poetic language, “bondsmen” refers to people whose freedom has been taken away through slavery, forced service, or another binding legal condition. The word emphasizes captivity and lack of personal autonomy rather than simply employment. In abolitionist poetry, it commonly refers to enslaved people and highlights the human suffering behind goods produced by enslaved labor.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Frances E. W. Harper’s “Free Labor,” the speaker says: “This fabric is too light to bear The weight of bondsmen’s tears,” Here, “bondsmen” means enslaved men whose forced labor may have helped produce cloth or cotton. Harper imagines their “tears” as a moral weight carried by fabric made through slavery, contrasting it with clothing produced by free labor.
Additional Notes
Singular form: bondsman; feminine historical form: bondswoman. The term comes from bond, meaning a binding obligation or restraint. “Bondsmen” may occasionally mean people bound to service by debt or contract, but in nineteenth-century American antislavery writing it usually means enslaved men. Do not confuse bondsmen with bondmen in modern finance or law, where a bondsman can mean a person who provides a surety bond, such as a bail bondsman. Related terms include bondage, enslaved person, captive, and serf, though these words describe different historical systems of unfreedom.
Also Known As
bondman bondmen serf villein thrall bond-servant Servant
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