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

0.032 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.

An Epitaph

by James Beattie

0.3019 − 0.0365i

Drawing the boundary…

To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep

by Edward Herbert

0.2707 − 0.0285i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

An Epitaph

by James Beattie

Like thee I once have stemm'd the sea of life,
Like thee have languish'd after empty joys,
Like thee have labour'd in the stormy strife,
Been grieved for trifles, and amused with toys.

Forget my frailties; thou art also frail:
Forgive my lapses; for thyself may'st fall:
Nor read unmoved my artless tender tale—
I was a friend, O man, to thee, to all.

To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep

by Edward Herbert

Uncessant minutes, whilst you move you tell
The time that tells our life, which, though it run
Never so fast or far, your new-begun
Short steps shall overtake; for though life well

May 'scape his own account, it shall not yours:
You are Death's auditors, that both divide
And sum whate'er that life inspir'd endures
Past a beginning, and through you we bide

The doom of Fate, whose unrecall'd decree
You date, bring, execute; making what's new
(Ill and good) old; for as we die in you,
You die in Time, Time in Eternity.

—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content