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



Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

William Cullen Bryant William Cullen Bryant

Poet B

Charlotte Smith Charlotte Smith
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 60% Poems 86% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

3 November 1794 – 12 June 1878 (~84)
12 live poems · English

William Cullen Bryant was born on 3 November 1794 in the rural hill town of Cummington, Massachusetts, and died in New York City on 12 June 1878. During his unusually long life, he became several things at once: one of the earliest American poets to command serious respect at home and abroad, a formidable editor whose newspaper helped shape national political opinion, a translator of Homer, a civic reformer, and a pu…

“To write fine poetry requires intellectual faculties of the highest order, and among these, not the least important, is the faculty of reason.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder
Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith

4 May 1749 – 28 October 1806 (~57)
7 live poems · English

Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…

“The language of the heart is not confined to any particular situation or time.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

William Cullen Bryant
Charlotte Smith
1749 1878
They overlapped for 13 years (1794–1806). When William Cullen Bryant was born, Charlotte Smith was about 45. William Cullen Bryant was about 12 when Charlotte Smith died.

On the map

About 5,361 km separate Cummington, Massachusetts, USA from Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

From the biographies

landscape

William Cullen Bryant: cummington, thanatopsis, frances fairchild, new york city, the ages, romanticism, peter bryant, the fountain and other poems. Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england.

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

Ay, thou art for the grave
William Cullen Bryant
81%
Compare
To the Muse
Charlotte Smith
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
77%
Compare
To the Muse
Charlotte Smith
June
William Cullen Bryant
76%
Compare
To the Muse
Charlotte Smith
Mutation
William Cullen Bryant
76% suffering
Compare
To the Muse
Charlotte Smith
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
76%
Compare
To the Shade of Burns
Charlotte Smith

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Cullen Bryant: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder. Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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