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

Home › Glossary › Letter H

Hope against hope

Black American
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

Hope against hope refers to maintaining expectation, faith, or aspiration despite overwhelming evidence of suffering, improbability, or continued injustice.

Detailed Definition
African American poetry frequently embodies hope against hope in contexts of enslavement, segregation, violence, exclusion, or inherited trauma. This hope is not naïve optimism but emotionally disciplined persistence under harsh conditions. The term helps interpret poems where endurance depends upon sustaining imagined possibility despite repeated disappointment, making hope itself an act of resistance and spiritual survival.
Example
Example in poetry:
Langston Hughes’s Dream Deferred engages hope against hope; A poem maintaining hope despite systemic disappointment reflects hope against hope; Verse expressing faith under repeated oppression demonstrates hope against hope; A poem imagining liberation despite bleak reality illustrates hope against hope; Poetry where endurance depends upon sustained hope reflects hope against hope
Additional Notes
Hope against hope is a phrase rooted in the apostle Paul's description of Abraham's faith (Romans 4:18) and carries specific resonance within African American theological and poetic traditions where maintaining hope in the face of overwhelming evidence of suffering is itself a political and spiritual act. Students should distinguish this concept from easy optimism: hope against hope is achieved rather than assumed, won through sustained engagement with darkness rather than denial of it. The spirituals — which maintained visions of freedom during slavery — are the paradigmatic example. Related terms include freedom dream, defiant joy, liberation theology, community survival, and redemption song. Contemporary poets like Lucille Clifton and Tracy K. Smith work within this tradition of difficult, earned hope.
Also Known As
Persistent hope Optimism amid despair Eschatological hope
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