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

Stephen Vincent Benét Stephen Vincent Benét

Poet B

Hervey Allen Hervey Allen
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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 75% Poems 81% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Stephen Vincent Benét

Stephen Vincent Benét

22 July 1898 – 13 March 1943 (~45)
2 live poems · English

Stephen Vincent Benét was a poet, novelist, and storyteller whose voice captured the sprawling, contradictory soul of America with a warmth and vigor that few writers of his era could match. In an age when modernism often turned inward toward fragmentation and irony, Benét looked outward, embracing history, folklore, and the ordinary heroism of everyday people. His words thrum with the crack of rifles at Harpers Ferr…

“Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
Hervey Allen

Hervey Allen

8 December 1889 – 28 December 1949 (~60)
2 live poems · English

On a crisp December day in 1889, in the bustling industrial heart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, William Hervey Allen Jr. entered the world. Born on December 8 to a middle-class family—his father, an inventive engineer who devised an automatic blast furnace stoker that helped power the steel mills—young Hervey grew up amid the clang of factories and the haze of smoke that defined the city’s relentless energy. He would…

“Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Wonder, Fear

In time

Stephen Vincent Benét
Hervey Allen
1889 1949
They overlapped for 46 years (1898–1943). When Stephen Vincent Benét was born, Hervey Allen was about 9. Hervey Allen was about 54 when Stephen Vincent Benét died.

On the map

About 391 km separate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Both have ground in Pennsylvania.

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

america

Stephen Vincent Benét: fountain hill, harpers ferry, john brown's body, rosemary carr, pulitzer prize, the devil and daniel webster, yale university, william rose benét. Hervey Allen: pittsburgh, coconut grove, ann allen, world war i veteran, ballads of the border, carolina chansons, wampum and old gold, toward the flame.

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.

American Names
Stephen Vincent Benét
71% world
Compare
Chicken Blood
Hervey Allen
The Innovator
Stephen Vincent Benét
70%
Compare
Walls
Hervey Allen
American Names
Stephen Vincent Benét
67%
Compare
Walls
Hervey Allen
The Innovator
Stephen Vincent Benét
64%
Compare
Chicken Blood
Hervey Allen

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Stephen Vincent Benét: Sorrow, Irony, Despair. Hervey Allen: Irony, Wonder, Fear.

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