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



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

Kahlil Gibran Kahlil Gibran

Poet B

Herbert Gorman Herbert Gorman
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 67% Poems 84% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran

6 January 1883 – 10 April 1931 (~48)
5 live poems · English

Kahlil Gibran, born on 6 January 1883 in the mountain town of Bsharri, in what is now northern Lebanon, and dead on 10 April 1931 in New York City, became one of the most widely read literary figures of the twentieth century. He was a poet, prose writer, essayist, painter, draftsman, cultural critic, and immigrant intellectual whose work traveled between Arabic and English, Lebanon and the United States, Christianity…

“When I am unhappy, dear Mary, I read your letters. When the mist overwhelms the I in me, I take two or three letters out of the little box and reread them.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Arabic Poets, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
Herbert Gorman

Herbert Gorman

January 1893 – 28 October 1954 (~61)
2 live poems · English

Herbert Sherman Gorman entered the world in 1893 in Springfield, Massachusetts, a bustling industrial city nestled along the Connecticut River, where the hum of factories and the clang of railroads shaped the rhythms of daily life. Though the precise day of his birth remains unrecorded in many accounts, his arrival coincided with an America on the cusp of modernity, one foot still planted in the Victorian era and the…

“To be an artist is to accept a severe discipline, for true creation demands an unyielding commitment to inner necessity.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Decadent Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

Kahlil Gibran
Herbert Gorman
1883 1954
They overlapped for 39 years (1893–1931). When Herbert Gorman was born, Kahlil Gibran was about 10. Herbert Gorman was about 38 when Kahlil Gibran died.

On the map

About 8,843 km separate Bsharri, Lebanon from Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in New York.

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

new york city

Kahlil Gibran: bsharri, lebanon, new york city, the prophet, arab émigré literary movement, kamila rahmeh, khalil sa‘d gibran, mary elizabeth haskell. Herbert Gorman: springfield massachusetts, new york city, jean wright gorman, the barcarole of james smith, the procession of masks, the peterborough anthology, james joyce, a passage to india.

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.

Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
75%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
73% longing
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
72%
Compare
The Mandrake Root
Herbert Gorman
Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
71%
Compare
The Mandrake Root
Herbert Gorman
On Prayer
Kahlil Gibran
70%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
Defeat
Kahlil Gibran
70% self
Compare
The Mandrake Root
Herbert Gorman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Kahlil Gibran: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder. Herbert Gorman: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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