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

John Drinkwater John Drinkwater

Poet B

Ford Madox Hueffer Ford Madox Hueffer
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 89% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater

1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937 (~55)
5 live poems · English

John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…

“All æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has been done.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Ford Madox Hueffer

Ford Madox Hueffer

17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939 (~66)
8 live poems · English

Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…

“You must therefore write as simply as you can—with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness

In time

John Drinkwater
Ford Madox Hueffer
1873 1939
They overlapped for 56 years (1882–1937). When John Drinkwater was born, Ford Madox Hueffer was about 9. Ford Madox Hueffer was about 64 when John Drinkwater died.

On the map

About 33 km separate Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex from Merton, Surrey, England. Both have ground in England.

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

John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander. Ford Madox Hueffer: merton, ford madox brown, the brown owl, the questions at the well, the fifth queen trilogy, the good soldier, joseph conrad, the english review.

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.

Harvesting
John Drinkwater
78%
Compare
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
Moonlit Apples
John Drinkwater
77%
Compare
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
77% world
Compare
Autumn Evening
Ford Madox Hueffer
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
76% world, landscape
Compare
On the Hills
Ford Madox Hueffer
The Ships of Grief
John Drinkwater
76% world, sorrow
Compare
On the Hills
Ford Madox Hueffer

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Ford Madox Hueffer: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.

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