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

Douglas Hyde Douglas Hyde

Poet B

Arthur O'Shaughnessy Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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 68% Poems 91% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Douglas Hyde

Douglas Hyde

17 January 1860 – 12 July 1949 (~89)
2 live poems · English

Douglas Hyde was born on 17 January 1860, near Castlerea in County Roscommon, into an Ireland whose languages, loyalties, and social memories were deeply divided. He died on 12 July 1949, having lived long enough to see the cultural cause that had occupied his youth become central to the public identity of an independent state. He was a poet, translator, folklorist, editor, scholar, teacher, cultural organizer, and,…

“Those who continue to speak their own language are in every way the intellectual and generally the moral superiors of those who have allowed it to die out.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Irony
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

14 March 1844 – 30 January 1881 (~37)
20 live poems · English

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…

“Having been wholly taken up with my visiting my friends the brotherhood of poets in Paris, I have since my arrival not had a minute to write to you until the present.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Douglas Hyde
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1844 1949
They overlapped for 22 years (1860–1881). When Douglas Hyde was born, Arthur O'Shaughnessy was about 16. Douglas Hyde was about 21 when Arthur O'Shaughnessy died.

On the map

About 606 km separate Castlerea, County Roscommon, Ireland from Ealing, London, England. 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

Douglas Hyde only

Arthur O'Shaughnessy only

From the biographies

Douglas Hyde: castlerea, county roscommon, first president of ireland, an craoibhín aoibhinn, beside the fire, love songs of connacht, the necessity for de-anglicising ireland, gaelic league. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.

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 Brow of Nefin
Douglas Hyde
84% love, world
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Brow of Nefin
Douglas Hyde
83% love
Compare
Love After Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Brow of Nefin
Douglas Hyde
83% beloved, love
Compare
A Life-Tomb
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Brow of Nefin
Douglas Hyde
82% beloved, love, world
Compare
Would I might go far over sea
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Brow of Nefin
Douglas Hyde
82% tree
Compare
The Cypress
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
I Shall Not Die For Thee
Douglas Hyde
82% beauty, love, desire, beloved
Compare
Would I might go far over sea
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Douglas Hyde: Longing, Sensuality, Irony. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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