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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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

Sadakichi Hartmann Sadakichi Hartmann

Poet B

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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 70% Poems 85% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sadakichi Hartmann

Sadakichi Hartmann

8 November 1867 – 22 November 1944 (~77)
2 live poems · English

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…

“I will drop the mask and tell you the secret of my verses. You say they impress you as being uneven and unfinished. I heartily agree with you.”

Neighbourhood: Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882 (~75)
69 live poems · English

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…

“The heart, like the mind, has a memory. And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes of the past.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Sadakichi Hartmann
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807 1944
They overlapped for 16 years (1867–1882). When Sadakichi Hartmann was born, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was about 60. Sadakichi Hartmann was about 15 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died.
Sadakichi Hartmann in history Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in history Years they were given

On the map

About 11,277 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan from Portland, Maine, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Sadakichi Hartmann

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Open both on the History Atlas

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

world love

Sadakichi Hartmann only

hartmann flowers spring snow blossoms plum winter fragrance blue waves dream water

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow only

life nature death memory divine grief spiritual loss beauty suffering harvest voice

From the biographies

Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: portland maine, bowdoin college, nathaniel hawthorne, frances appleton, paul revere’s ride, the village blacksmith, the song of hiawatha, outre-mer.

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.

Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
80% spring
Compare
An April Day
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
79% flowers
Compare
Flowers
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
79% flowers, world
Compare
Flowers
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
78% world
Compare
A Gleam of Sunshine
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
78% world, love, water
Compare
The Bridge
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
77%
Compare
Fata Morgana
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1868 Fourteenth Amendment Ratified
1868 The Helium Discovery Eclipse
1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall
1870 Second Industrial Revolution Accelerates
1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition

Sadakichi Hartmann

1868 Relocation to Hamburg
1882 Arrival in America
1882 Enrolled in Imperial Naval Academy
1884 Meeting Walt Whitman
1887 Founding the Whitman Society
1930 Involvement in the Japanese-American Community
1935 Publication of 'The Art of the Japanese Print'
1940 Final Years in Los Angeles

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1821 Longfellow Enters Bowdoin College
1826 Longfellow's First European Sojourn
1831 Marriage to Mary Storer Potter
1835 Death of First Wife Mary Potter Longfellow
1836 Appointment to Harvard Professorship
1839 Publication of Voices of the Night
1843 Marriage to Frances 'Fanny' Appleton
1861 Death of Second Wife Fanny Appleton Longfellow

Emotional landscapes

Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.

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