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

Hilda Doolittle Hilda Doolittle
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 78% Poems 88% Blended 83%
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…

“The bitterest and most enduring animosities would be likely to spring up from the ruins of old affection.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
Hilda Doolittle

Hilda Doolittle

10 September 1886 – 27 September 1961 (~75)
6 live poems · English

Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…

“Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing

In time

Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Hilda Doolittle
1793 1961
Their lives did not overlap. 51 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 5,424 km separate Liverpool, England from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 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

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison. Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college.

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
79% life, world
Compare
The Helmsman
Hilda Doolittle
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
78% memory, love
Compare
Loss
Hilda Doolittle
Bring Flowers
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
77% beauty
Compare
Orchard
Hilda Doolittle
Casabianca
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
76%
Compare
Loss
Hilda Doolittle
The Myrtle Bough
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
75%
Compare
The Helmsman
Hilda Doolittle
The Wakening
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
75% life, world
Compare
The Helmsman
Hilda Doolittle

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.

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