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

Edward James Mortimer Collins Edward James Mortimer Collins

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 72% Poems 88% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edward James Mortimer Collins

Edward James Mortimer Collins

29 June 1827 – 28 July 1876 (~49)
3 live poems · English

In the grand tapestry of Victorian literature, where titans like Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold cast long shadows across the poetic landscape, there exist quieter voices whose contributions, though perhaps less monumental, possess their own distinctive charm and significance. Edward James Mortimer Collins (29 June 1827 – 28 July 1876) was an English novelist, journalist and poet whose work embodied "light grace, thei…

“There are two classes of men; those who are content to yield to circumstances and who play whist; those who aim to control circumstances, and who play Chess.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
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…

“I wish to provide against the series of poems which I have associated with the art of sculpture being judged from an erroneous point of view.”

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

In time

Edward James Mortimer Collins
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1827 1881
They overlapped for 33 years (1844–1876). When Arthur O'Shaughnessy was born, Edward James Mortimer Collins was about 17. Arthur O'Shaughnessy was about 32 when Edward James Mortimer Collins died.

On the map

About 289 km separate Plymouth, Devon, England from Ealing, London, 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

Edward James Mortimer Collins only

Arthur O'Shaughnessy only

From the biographies

social

Edward James Mortimer Collins: plymouth, francis collins, guernsey, berkshire, light verse, social observation, cornhill magazine, blackwood's magazine. 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.

Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
78% love, life
Compare
Fetters
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
78% love
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Violets at Home
Edward James Mortimer Collins
76% love, beauty
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
76% beloved
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
76% beloved, love, desire
Compare
Would I might go far over sea
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
76% love, life, happiness
Compare
Love After Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edward James Mortimer Collins: Tenderness, Longing, Joy. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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