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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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.

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

0.008 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.

Rubies

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

−0.4609 − 0.5619i

Drawing the boundary…

Rooks (II)

by Charles Sorley

−0.4531 − 0.5596i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Rubies

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

They brought me rubies from the mine,
  And held them to the sun;
I said, they are drops of frozen wine
  From Eden's vats that run.

I looked again,—I thought them hearts
  Of friends to friends unknown;
Tides that should warm each neighboring life
  Are locked in sparkling stone.

But fire to thaw that ruddy snow,
  To break enchanted ice,
And give love's scarlet tides to flow,—
  When shall that sun arise?

Rooks (II)

by Charles Sorley

There is such cry in all these birds,
More than can ever be express’d;
If I should put it into words,
You would agree it were not best
To wake such wonder from its rest.

But since to-night the world is still
And only they and I astir,
We are united, will to will,
By bondage tighter, tenderer
Than any lovers ever were.

And if, of too much labouring.
All that I see around should die
(There is such sleep in each green thing,
Such weariness in all the sky),
We would live on, these birds and I.

Yet how? since everything must pass
At evening with the sinking sun,
And Christ is gone, and Barabbas,
Judas and Jesus, gone, clean gone,
Then how shall I live on?

Yet surely, Judas must have heard
Amidst his torments the long cry
Of some lone Israelitish bird,
And on it, ere he went to die,
Thrown all his spirit’s agony.

And that immortal cry which welled
For Judas, ever afterwards
Passion on passion still has swelled
And sweetened, till to-night these birds
Will take my words, will take my words,

And wrapping them in music meet
Will sing their spirit through the sky,
Strange and unsatisfied and sweet—
That, when stock-dead am I, am I,
O, these will never die!

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