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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

Sarah Doudney Sarah Doudney

Poet B

Thomas Hood Thomas Hood
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 63% Blended 63%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sarah Doudney

Sarah Doudney

15 January 1841 – 8 December 1926 (~85)
1 live poem · English

Sarah Doudney was born on 15 January 1841 in Portsea, Hampshire, at a time when the crowded naval and commercial communities around Portsmouth were expanding alongside Victorian Britain’s confidence in trade, empire, religion, and print. She was the daughter of a soap and candle manufacturer, and the practical details of that background matter. Although later summaries have sometimes simplified it into a “working-cla…

“There are women to whom nature has granted the gift of silent emotion. They have mobile faces, changeful eyes, soft lips, which express joy or desolation naturally, and with the charm of perfect simplicity and truth.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood

23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845 (~46)
25 live poems · English

Thomas Hood was born in London on 23 May 1799 and died there on 3 May 1845, only twenty days short of his forty-sixth birthday. He occupies a distinctive, sometimes deceptively difficult place in English literary history. To generations of readers he has been the author of jokes, puns, comic ballads, and apparently effortless verbal absurdities; to others he is the compassionate author of “The Song of the Shirt” and…

“The best of friends must part.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Sarah Doudney
Thomas Hood
1799 1926
They overlapped for 5 years (1841–1845). When Sarah Doudney was born, Thomas Hood was about 42. Sarah Doudney was about 4 when Thomas Hood died.

On the map

About 98 km separate Portsea, Hampshire, England from The Poultry, Cheapside, London. Both have ground in England.

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 woman

Sarah Doudney: portsea, hampshire, the lesson of the water-mill, the christian's good-night, the sunday magazine, good words, the quiver, victorian literature. Thomas Hood: london, the song of the shirt, the bridge of sighs, j. h. reynolds, whims and oddities, the dream of eugene aram, faithless sally brown, the plea of the midsummer fairies.

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 Lesson of the Water Mill
Sarah Doudney
78% life
Compare
The Poet's Portion
Thomas Hood
The Lesson of the Water Mill
Sarah Doudney
77% life, love
Compare
Time, Hope, and Memory
Thomas Hood
The Lesson of the Water Mill
Sarah Doudney
75% life, love
Compare
Let Us Make a Leap
Thomas Hood
The Lesson of the Water Mill
Sarah Doudney
75%
Compare
Ode: Autumn
Thomas Hood

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sarah Doudney: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Hood: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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