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

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan

Poet B

E. Nesbit E. Nesbit
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 66% Poems 91% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan

22 March 1808 – 15 June 1877 (~69)
10 live poems · English

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan, later Caroline Norton and, in the final months of her life, Lady Stirling-Maxwell, was born in London on 22 March 1808 and died in London on 15 June 1877. She was a poet, novelist, dramatist, political hostess, journalist, pamphleteer, and one of the most consequential campaigners for married women’s legal rights in nineteenth-century Britain. Her fame during her lifetime rested partly on…

“The married woman has no legal existence: her being is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs everything.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit

15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924 (~66)
4 live poems · English

Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…

“I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
E. Nesbit
1808 1924
They overlapped for 20 years (1858–1877). When E. Nesbit was born, Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan was about 50. E. Nesbit was about 19 when Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan died.

On the map

About 16 km separate Mayfair, London from Kennington, Surrey, 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

social marriage

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan: london, caroline henrietta callander, the sorrows of rosalie, the undying one, george chapple norton, lord melbourne, custody of infants act 1839, richard brinsley sheridan. E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire.

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.

Love Not
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
85% love, beloved, romantic
Compare
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
Oh, Love Me! Love Me Still!
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
85% love, beloved
Compare
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
I Do Not Love Thee
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
83% love, beloved
Compare
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
When First I Loved Thee
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
82% love
Compare
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
I Do Not Love Thee
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
82% love
Compare
The Wife of All Ages
E. Nesbit
Farewell
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
81% love, beloved
Compare
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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