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.

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

Joaquin Miller Joaquin Miller

Poet B

Witter Bynner Witter Bynner
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 72% Poems 84% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Joaquin Miller

Joaquin Miller

8 September 1837 – 17 February 1913 (~76)
2 live poems · English

Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837, and dead on February 17, 1913, lived a life that seemed designed to invite legend. He was a poet, journalist, lawyer, teacher, dramatist, lecturer, rancher, and relentless self-inventor. To admirers in the nineteenth century, he was the “Poet of the Sierras,” a bard who had given the American West its own grand, romantic voice. To skeptics, he was an…

“To me the savage of the plains or the negro of the South is a truer poet than the scholar of Oxford.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Witter Bynner

Witter Bynner

10 August 1881 – 1 June 1968 (~87)
4 live poems · English

Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…

“I had come to feel that poetic literature must contain streams from one or the other of these two sources: the Greek and the Hebrew.”

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

In time

Joaquin Miller
Witter Bynner
1837 1968
They overlapped for 33 years (1881–1913). When Witter Bynner was born, Joaquin Miller was about 44. Witter Bynner was about 32 when Joaquin Miller died.

On the map

About 1,034 km separate Indiana, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Shared ground: United States.

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

landscape

Joaquin Miller: poet of the sierras, oregon territory, life amongst the modocs, kit carson's ride, songs of the sierras, songs of the sun-lands, theresa dyer, abigail leland. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.

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.

Life
Joaquin Miller
78% love
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner
Is It Worth While?
Joaquin Miller
73%
Compare
Sands
Witter Bynner
Life
Joaquin Miller
73%
Compare
Sands
Witter Bynner
Is It Worth While?
Joaquin Miller
71%
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner
Is It Worth While?
Joaquin Miller
70%
Compare
Foam
Witter Bynner
Life
Joaquin Miller
70%
Compare
Ganymede
Witter Bynner

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Joaquin Miller: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.

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