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

Jean Ingelow Jean Ingelow

Poet B

Ella Wheeler Wilcox Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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 73% Poems 85% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jean Ingelow

Jean Ingelow

17 March 1820 – 20 July 1897 (~77)
2 live poems · English

In the spring of 1863, the Victorian literary world witnessed a phenomenon that would become increasingly rare in the annals of English poetry: the overnight success of a provincial poet whose work captured both popular imagination and critical acclaim. Jean Ingelow, a banker's daughter from the Lincolnshire fens, achieved what many seasoned writers could only dream of—instant fame through a single collection of poem…

“I am glad to think I am not bound to make the world go right, but only to discover and to do, with cheerful heart, the work that God appoints.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

5 November 1850 – 30 October 1919 (~69)
22 live poems · English

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…

“Sorrow is no respecter of persons.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

Jean Ingelow
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1820 1919
They overlapped for 48 years (1850–1897). When Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born, Jean Ingelow was about 30. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was about 47 when Jean Ingelow died.

On the map

About 6,293 km separate Boston, Lincolnshire, England from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. 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

From the biographies

popular

Jean Ingelow: boston, lincolnshire fens, the high tide on the coast of lincolnshire, 1571, poems, orriss, gerald massey, jane and ann taylor, off the skelligs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.

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.

With a Diamond
Jean Ingelow
74%
Compare
Time and Love
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
With a Diamond
Jean Ingelow
74%
Compare
Desolation
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Long White Seam
Jean Ingelow
73% love
Compare
Reunited
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
With a Diamond
Jean Ingelow
73%
Compare
Existence
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
With a Diamond
Jean Ingelow
72%
Compare
Regret
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
With a Diamond
Jean Ingelow
72% grief
Compare
The Call
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Jean Ingelow: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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