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



Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.013 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.

Portygee Lovesong

by Genevieve Taggard

−0.1228 − 0.6973i

Drawing the boundary…

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

by Nora Hopper Chesson

−0.1210 − 0.7104i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Portygee Lovesong

by Genevieve Taggard

Dolores Lane was where she lived
Before she lived with me,
And when she left Dolores Lane
There was no one to see;
She left it in the bitter rain
To come and live with me.

Within my house is firelight,
Without, is bitter rain.
She does not love the firelight,—
Against the window-pane
She leans and looks and longs, to-night,
For dull Dolores Lane.

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

by Nora Hopper Chesson

East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon 
They all must go who'd find her boon. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

West o' the Moon, East o' the Sun, 
Thither are many roads that run, 
But the right road is the only one. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

Her heart (woe's me!) is locked and cold- 
A secret chamber filled with gold. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

Straight as a lily-wand is she, 
Her face is pale as lilies be, 
Her brown hair floweth to her knee. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

Her hands are idle hands and white, 
They spin nor weave by day or night. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

And yet those slender hands, God wot, 
Have dug graves in her garden plot 
'Neath tangles of forget-me-not. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

There is no Saint in Paradise 
Bends brows above such holy eyes. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

And be her eyes or blue or grey, 
There lives no man on earth to say, 
Yet her eyes draw men's souls away 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

And who dare kiss her on the mouth 
Knows no more hunger, no more drouth. 
(La Belle Dame Sans Mercy!) 

And whoso she hath kissed again 
Is blest among all other men: 
But Heaven's gate shuts him agen 
And La Belle Dame Sans Mercy. 

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