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

Nora Hopper Chesson Nora Hopper Chesson
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 92% Blended 82%
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…

“There are some writers whose works we cannot read without feeling as if we really had looked with them upon the scenes they bring before us.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
Nora Hopper Chesson

Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 – 14 April 1906 (~35)
79 live poems · English

Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…

“English Christmas-keepers would do well to borrow from their neighbours in the Netherlands and in Austria-Hungary.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Nora Hopper Chesson
1793 1906
Their lives did not overlap. 36 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 300 km separate Liverpool, England from Exeter, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

memory

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.

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.

Bring Flowers
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
83% flowers, world
Compare
Castara's Flitting
Nora Hopper Chesson
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
82%
Compare
Castara's Flitting
Nora Hopper Chesson
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
82% memory, remembrance, love
Compare
Rosemary for Remembrance
Nora Hopper Chesson
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
82% memory, love
Compare
May Eve
Nora Hopper Chesson
Bring Flowers
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
81% flowers, beauty
Compare
Columbines
Nora Hopper Chesson
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
81%
Compare
The Hill-Winds
Nora Hopper Chesson

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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