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

Felicia Dorothea Hemans Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Poet B

Sara Teasdale Sara Teasdale
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 74% Poems 89% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Felicia Dorothea Hemans

25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835 (~42)
11 live poems · English

Felicia Dorothea Hemans, born Felicia Dorothea Browne on 25 September 1793 and dead on 16 May 1835, was among the most celebrated poets of the early nineteenth century. In her lifetime she was read with an enthusiasm now difficult to imagine: her poems circulated throughout Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the British Empire; they appeared in annuals, schoolbooks, anthologies, newspapers, and domestic parlors…

“It is so pleasant to write as if one were talking by the fireside in winter, or on some quiet garden-seat in summer-time.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 – 29 January 1933 (~49)
25 live poems · English

Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her poems spoke of love, solitude, desire, beauty, loss, the changing seasons, and death. Their clarity made…

“If each poet will try to get himself down in black and white as concisely and honestly as he can, every kind of reaction to beauty and pain will finally be recorded.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Sara Teasdale
1793 1933
Their lives did not overlap. 49 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 6,499 km separate Liverpool, England from St. Louis, Missouri, 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

women woman

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison. Sara Teasdale: st. louis, sonnets to duse, helen of troy, rivers to the sea, love songs, vachel lindsay, ernst filsinger, mary institute.

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 Landing of the Pilgrims
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
81%
Compare
Youth and the Pilgrim
Sara Teasdale
Thou Wakest from Rosy Sleep
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
80%
Compare
Youth and the Pilgrim
Sara Teasdale
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
80% memory, life, love
Compare
Dreams
Sara Teasdale
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
78% love
Compare
Pity
Sara Teasdale
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
78% life, love
Compare
I Love You
Sara Teasdale
Thou Wakest from Rosy Sleep
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
78% life
Compare
Joy
Sara Teasdale

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Sara Teasdale: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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