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

William Allingham William Allingham

Poet B

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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 58% Blended 58%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Allingham

William Allingham

19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889 (~65)
1 live poem · English

William Allingham was born on 19 March 1824 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a small market town at the mouth of the River Erne, and died on 18 November 1889 at Hampstead in London. His literary reputation rests above all on a handful of extraordinarily durable lyrics: poems of rivers, birds, childhood, fairy lore, village life, and remembered Irish landscapes. Yet his career was broader and more complicated than the…

“Does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men’s work?”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832 (~83)
2 live poems · German

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and dead 22 March 1832 in Weimar, became during his own lifetime a European institution: poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, civil servant, theater director, scientific investigator, memoirist, and theorist of culture. To call him Germany’s greatest writer is conventional but not empty praise. Goethe helped give the German language a literary authori…

“Every hope is, in itself, a good deed.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, German Romantics, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

William Allingham
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 1889
They overlapped for 9 years (1824–1832). When William Allingham was born, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was about 75. William Allingham was about 8 when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died.

On the map

About 1,243 km separate Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland from Frankfurt, Germany. 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

William Allingham only

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe only

From the biographies

social

William Allingham: ballyshannon, county donegal, the faeries, laurence bloomfield in ireland, the winding banks of erne, victorian britain, pre-raphaelite circle, dante gabriel rossetti. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: frankfurt am main, weimar, sturm und drang, the sorrows of young werther, götz von berlichingen, anna katharina schönkopf, friederike brion, charlotte von stein.

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 Fairies
William Allingham
71% world, landscape
Compare
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Fairies
William Allingham
61%
Compare
Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Allingham: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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