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

Sir Samuel Ferguson Sir Samuel Ferguson
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 62% Blended 62%
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…

“Art freedom and finality no more spring from excesses than from conservatism.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities
Sir Samuel Ferguson

Sir Samuel Ferguson

10 March 1810 – 9 August 1886 (~76)
1 live poem · English

Sir Samuel Ferguson was born in Belfast on 10 March 1810, at a moment when Ireland’s political union with Great Britain was still recent and its cultural future was fiercely contested. He died in Howth, County Dublin, on 9 August 1886, having become one of the most distinctive Irish literary figures of the nineteenth century: poet, barrister, judge, antiquary, translator, public servant, and advocate for the serious…

“I was an Irishman before I was a Protestant.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sensuality
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Cale Young Rice
Sir Samuel Ferguson
1810 1943
They overlapped for 15 years (1872–1886). When Cale Young Rice was born, Sir Samuel Ferguson was about 62. Cale Young Rice was about 14 when Sir Samuel Ferguson died.
Cale Young Rice in history Sir Samuel Ferguson in history Years they were given

On the map

About 6,203 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Cale Young Rice

Sir Samuel Ferguson

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

love

Cale Young Rice only

life world death woman grave beauty nature mother moor grief quest journey

Sir Samuel Ferguson only

beloved irish heart ferguson

From the biographies

Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university. Sir Samuel Ferguson: belfast, howth, mary catherine guinness, hibernian nights' entertainments, lays of the western gael, the forging of the anchor, ulster cycle, irish antiquarianism.

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.

On the Moor
Cale Young Rice
75%
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson
Sea-Hoardings
Cale Young Rice
73% heart
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson
Incredible!
Cale Young Rice
73%
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson
Wanting the Moon
Cale Young Rice
72%
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson
Millicent Passes
Cale Young Rice
67% love
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson
The Mystic
Cale Young Rice
65%
Compare
Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
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 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'

Sir Samuel Ferguson

1837 Marriage to Mary Anne McGowan
1846 Publication of 'The Forging of the Anchor'
1849 Appointment as a Barrister
1851 Publication of 'Lays of the Western Gael'
1867 Becoming Chief Baron of the Irish Court of Exchequer
1876 Publication of 'The Last of the Irish Chiefs'
1885 Knighted for Public Service
1886 Final Publication: 'Poems and Translations'

Emotional landscapes

Cale Young Rice: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. Sir Samuel Ferguson: Tenderness, Longing, Sensuality.

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