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

Cale Young Rice Cale Young Rice

Poet B

William Ellery Leonard William Ellery Leonard
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 64% Poems 83% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Cale Young Rice

Cale Young Rice

7 December 1872 – 24 January 1943 (~71)
8 live poems · English

Cale Young Rice was born on 7 December 1872 in Dixon, Kentucky, and died on 24 January 1943 in Louisville, Kentucky. During his lifetime he was a conspicuous, if never wholly central, figure in American letters: a poet of formal accomplishment, a playwright attracted to historical spectacle and moral conflict, a lecturer, traveler, and public literary presence. In the decades around 1900, when American poetry stood b…

“I have believed that poetry without fundamental vitality is bloodless; without passion, fleshless; without spirit, nerveless; and without thought, spineless.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities
William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard

25 January 1876 – 2 May 1944 (~68)
2 live poems · English

On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…

“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Cale Young Rice
William Ellery Leonard
1872 1944
They overlapped for 68 years (1876–1943). When William Ellery Leonard was born, Cale Young Rice was about 4. William Ellery Leonard was about 67 when Cale Young Rice died.
Cale Young Rice in history William Ellery Leonard in history Years they were given

On the map

About 1,195 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Plainfield, New Jersey, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Cale Young Rice

William Ellery Leonard

Open both on the History Atlas

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

life grief love

Cale Young Rice only

world death woman grave beauty nature mother moor quest journey sublime mystic

William Ellery Leonard only

self truth beloved voice silence belovèd plea youth youthful wisdom authentic

From the biographies

social

Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university. William Ellery Leonard: plainfield, new jersey, charlotte freeman, two lives, sonnets and poems, the lynching bee and other poems, agoraphobia, madison mob, boston university.

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.

Millicent Passes
Cale Young Rice
73% life
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
Sea-Hoardings
Cale Young Rice
72%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
On the Moor
Cale Young Rice
72% grief
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
On the Moor
Cale Young Rice
71% life
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
Wanting the Moon
Cale Young Rice
71%
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
Incredible!
Cale Young Rice
71%
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'

Cale Young Rice

1890 Education at Cumberland University
1894 Education at Harvard University
1900 Publication of 'From Dusk to Dusk'
1908 Publication of 'Nirvana Days'
1910 Move to New York City
1915 Friendship with Robert Frost
1921 Publication of 'The Book of the Dead'
1930 Publication of 'The Ghost of the Sun'

William Ellery Leonard

1885 First Formal Education
1893 Relocation to Bolton's Landing
1901 First Published Poem
1904 Marriage to Mary Elizabeth Houghton
1920 Friendship with Robert Frost
1931 Publication of 'The Poet's Way'
1934 Involvement with the Poetry Society of America
1943 Publication of 'The Collected Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Cale Young Rice: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. William Ellery Leonard: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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