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

Manmohan Ghose Manmohan Ghose

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 74% Poems 89% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Manmohan Ghose

Manmohan Ghose

19 January 1869 – 4 January 1924 (~55)
2 live poems · English

In the annals of Indian literature, few figures occupy a position as quietly significant yet fundamentally pioneering as Manmohan Ghose (19 January 1869 – 4 January 1924), one of the earliest Indian poets to write substantially in English. Born in Bhagalpur in Bengal, Ghose's life represents a fascinating narrative of cultural displacement, artistic achievement, and personal tragedy. He stands as a bridge between two…

“At present then I am resolved to read and reflect more and produce less.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
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…

“A clerk in the Secretary's Office told me ‘it was all about my book’.”

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

In time

Manmohan Ghose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1844 1924
They overlapped for 13 years (1869–1881). When Manmohan Ghose was born, Arthur O'Shaughnessy was about 25. Manmohan Ghose was about 12 when Arthur O'Shaughnessy died.

On the map

About 7,648 km separate Bhagalpur, Bengal, India from Ealing, London, England. 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

Manmohan Ghose only

Arthur O'Shaughnessy only

From the biographies

Manmohan Ghose: bhagalpur, sri aurobindo, primavera: poems by four authors, the blindness of love, laurence binyon, oxford, presidency college, malati banerjee. 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.

A Lament
Manmohan Ghose
81% grief, beloved
Compare
A Life-Tomb
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A Lament
Manmohan Ghose
81% world, grief, beloved
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A Lament
Manmohan Ghose
81% grief
Compare
Love After Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A Lament
Manmohan Ghose
81% world, beauty
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Heap ruby upon amethyst,
Manmohan Ghose
80% love, rose
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A Lament
Manmohan Ghose
79% beloved
Compare
If She But Knew
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Manmohan Ghose: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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