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

0.020 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.

Now fie on foolish love

by Francis Beaumont

0.0009 − 0.0452i

Drawing the boundary…

Fetters

by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

−0.0189 − 0.0495i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Now fie on foolish love

by Francis Beaumont

Now fie on foolish love, it not befits
Or man or woman know it.
Love was not meant for people in their wits,
And they that fondly show it
Betray the straw, and features in their brain,
And shall have Bedlam for their pain:
If simple love be such a curse,
To marry is to make it ten times worse.

Fetters

by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

In too much seeking love I found but grief; 
I have but multiplied the means of pain;
A thousand ties too poignant or too brief 
Bind me to things that love not back again.

All things with equal power my heart have won — 
Truth by its light, the Unknown by its veil — 
A tenuous gold thread binds me to the sun, 
And to each star a silken thread more frail.

The cadence chains me to the melody, 
Its velvet softness to the rose I touch; 
One smile soon robbed my eye of liberty, 
And for my mouth the first kiss did as much.

My life now hangs upon these fragile threads, 
Captive of all fair things I feel or see; 
Each breath that change or trouble o'er them sheds
Rends from my heart itself a part of me.

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