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

Patrick Reginald Chalmers Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Poet B

Edward Thomas Edward Thomas
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 71% Poems 90% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

27 June 1872 – 12 September 1942 (~70)
15 live poems · English

Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born on 27 June 1872 at Brechin, Angus, Scotland, and died on 12 September 1942. He belonged to that substantial but now less frequently discussed group of early twentieth-century British writers whose literary lives flourished outside the most conspicuous movements of their age. Chalmers was neither an avant-garde modernist nor a public prophet of national importance. He did not seek to…

“But, somehow, I always suspect the man who tells me that a dog smells. I suspect him of not keeping the same dog in health, cleanliness and work.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities
Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas

3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917 (~39)
24 live poems · English

Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…

“The road is an old friend to me.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Edward Thomas
1872 1942
They overlapped for 40 years (1878–1917). When Edward Thomas was born, Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 6. Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 45 when Edward Thomas died.
Patrick Reginald Chalmers in history Edward Thomas in history Years they were given

On the map

About 605 km separate Brechin, Angus, Scotland from Lambeth, London, England. Both have ground in England.

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Edward Thomas

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

world life beauty memory

Patrick Reginald Chalmers only

spring past faun presence wind rural winter river fish nature water josephine

Edward Thomas only

death self light love sound rain dark dead name birds landscape happiness

From the biographies

rural country landscape

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: brechin, angus, green days and blue days, a picker of pebbles, punch and judy, at the tail of the weir, the obsessive angler, rugby school. Edward Thomas: lambeth, first world war, robert frost, adlestrop, the happy-go-lucky morgans, six poems, poems, oxford.

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.

Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
82% world, light
Compare
The Dark Forest
Edward Thomas
The Tortoiseshell Cat
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
82% beauty, animal
Compare
A Cat
Edward Thomas
Dirge to a Dead Owl
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
80% death, dead
Compare
The Cuckoo
Edward Thomas
Dirge to a Dead Owl
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
80% world
Compare
The Owl
Edward Thomas
If Flowers Had Ghosts
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
79% spring, memory
Compare
The Word
Edward Thomas
Dirge to a Dead Owl
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
79% death, life
Compare
A Cat
Edward Thomas

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

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'
1884 Oxford English Dictionary Begins Publication
1884 Publication of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

1885 Education at Rugby School
1891 Career in Banking Begins
1912 First Poetry Collection Published
1912 Publication of 'Green Days and Blue Days'
1917 Publication of 'A Picker of Pebbles'
1920 Publication of 'Punch and Judy'
1935 Publication of 'The Poet's Corner'
1935 Publication of 'The Wind and the Rain'

Edward Thomas

1897 First Major Publication: 'The Woodland Life'
1897 Publication of 'The Woodland Life'
1899 Marriage of Edward Thomas
1899 Marriage of Edward Thomas and Helen Noble
1900 Edward Thomas's Departure from Oxford
1913 Friendship with Robert Frost
1915 Enlistment in the British Army
1917 Publication of 'Last Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace. Edward Thomas: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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