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

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Poet B

Arthur Hugh Clough Arthur Hugh Clough
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 86% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

17 August 1840 – 10 September 1922 (~82)
9 live poems · English

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, born on 17 August 1840 at Petworth in Sussex and dead on 10 September 1922 at Newbuildings Place, his Sussex home, lived a life unusually crowded with contradiction. He was an English gentleman who became one of Victorian Britain’s most persistent critics of empire; a formal, often old-fashioned poet who sought to make verse answer political injustice; a diplomat who abandoned official service i…

“If it is true that your worship of Force is to be the creed of the future, and very likely it will be so, it is only another proof of the innate vulgarity of man.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough

1 January 1819 – 13 November 1861 (~42)
12 live poems · English

Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…

“People won’t read Chaucer against their ears.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing

In time

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Arthur Hugh Clough
1819 1922
They overlapped for 22 years (1840–1861). When Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was born, Arthur Hugh Clough was about 21. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was about 21 when Arthur Hugh Clough died.

On the map

About 310 km separate Petworth House, Sussex, England from Liverpool, England. 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

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: petworth, newbuildings place, lady anne blunt, the bedouin tribes of the euphrates, a pilgrimage to nejd, crabbet park, arabian horse breeding, stonyhurst college. Arthur Hugh Clough: liverpool, florence, charleston, thomas arnold, matthew arnold, oxford movement, amours de voyage, the bothie of tober-na-vuolich.

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.

He Laments that His Love is Dead
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
81% world
Compare
A Song of Autumn
Arthur Hugh Clough
On Her Vanity
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
78% woman, social
Compare
A Protest
Arthur Hugh Clough
Love is Best
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
77% life
Compare
Shall I decide it by a random shot?
Arthur Hugh Clough
O fly not, Pleasure
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
77% loss, grief
Compare
A Song of Autumn
Arthur Hugh Clough
The Grief of Love
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
76% grief
Compare
A Song of Autumn
Arthur Hugh Clough
Love is Best
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
76%
Compare
Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Arthur Hugh Clough

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Arthur Hugh Clough: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.

Skip to main content