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

A. A. Milne A. A. Milne

Poet B

Marsden Hartley Marsden Hartley
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.

Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 50% Blended 50%
Swap sides Another related pair
A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956 (~74)
67 live poems · English

Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London, on 18 January 1882, into a household where education, discipline, and intellectual curiosity were daily realities. He was the youngest of three sons of John Vine Milne and Sarah Marie Heginbotham Milne. His father was the headmaster of Henley House School, a small independent school in Kilburn, and the school stood at the center of family life. The young Alan was educ…

“Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness
Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley

4 January 1877 – 2 September 1943 (~66)
1 live poem · English

Marsden Hartley stands as one of the most fascinating yet often overlooked figures in American modernism—a man who moved between painting and poetry with equal fervor, whose work captured the raw, untamed spirit of early twentieth-century artistic experimentation. Though primarily remembered as a visual artist, Hartley's literary output reveals a sensibility equally attuned to the power of words as to the force of co…

“I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness

In time

A. A. Milne
Marsden Hartley
1877 1956
They overlapped for 62 years (1882–1943). When A. A. Milne was born, Marsden Hartley was about 5. A. A. Milne was about 61 when Marsden Hartley died.

On the map

About 5,090 km separate Hampstead, London, England from Lewiston, Maine, USA. 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

A. A. Milne: kilburn, henley house school, h. g. wells, trinity college, granta, punch, winnie-the-pooh, christopher robin. Marsden Hartley: lewiston, maine, cleveland school of art, william merritt chase, alfred stieglitz, war motif series, karl von freyburg, twenty-five poems, androscoggin.

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.

The Mirror
A. A. Milne
73% world
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley
Summer Afternoon
A. A. Milne
73% fish, world
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley
Water-Lillies
A. A. Milne
72% world
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley
The Charcoal Burner
A. A. Milne
70% world
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley
The Alchemist
A. A. Milne
70%
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley
Knights and Ladies
A. A. Milne
70% world
Compare
Fishmonger
Marsden Hartley

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

A. A. Milne: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness. Marsden Hartley: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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