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



Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.014 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.

O ye tender babes

by Thomas Tallis

0.5088 + 0.2328i

Drawing the boundary…

Loves Garden Grief

by Robert Southwell

0.5166 + 0.2206i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.

O ye tender babes

by Thomas Tallis

O ye tender babes of England,
shake off slothfulness, set wantonness apart.
Apply your wits wholly to learning and virtue,
whereby you may do your duty to God and your King.
Make glad your parents, profit yourselves,
And much advance the commonweal of your country.

Loves Garden Grief

by Robert Southwell

Vaine loves avaunt, infamous is your pleasure,
Your joy deceit:
Your jewels jests, and worthelesse trash your treasure,
Fooles common bait.
Your pallace is a prison that allureth
To sweet mishap, and rest that paine procureth,

Your garden griefe, hedg'd in with thornes of envie,
And stakes of strife:
Your Allyes errour graveled with Jelosie,
And cares of life.
Your bankes are seates enwrapt with shades of sadnes,
Your Arbours breed rough fittes of raging madnes.

Your beds are sowne with seedes of all iniquitie,
And poys'ning weeds:
Whose stalkes evill thoughts, whose leaves words full of vanity,
Whose fruite misdeedes.
Whose sap is sinne, whose force and operation,
To banish grace, and worke the soules damnation.

Your trees are dismall plantes of pyning corrosives,
Whose roote is ruth.
Whose barke is bale, whose tymber stubborne fantasyes:
Whose pyth untruth.
On which in liewe of birdes whose voyce delighteth:
Of guiltie conscience screeching note affrighteth.

Your coolest summer gales are scalding sighings,
Your shoures are teares,
Your sweetest smell the stench of sinfull livyng,
Your favoures feares,
Your gardener Sathan, all you reape is misery:
Your gaine remorse and losse of all felicitie.

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