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

Patrick Reginald Chalmers Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Poet B

William Ellery Leonard William Ellery Leonard
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 59% Poems 78% Blended 68%
Swap sides Another related pair
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

27 June 1872 – 12 September 1942 (~70)
15 live poems · English

Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born on 27 June 1872 at Brechin, Angus, Scotland, and died on 12 September 1942. He belonged to that substantial but now less frequently discussed group of early twentieth-century British writers whose literary lives flourished outside the most conspicuous movements of their age. Chalmers was neither an avant-garde modernist nor a public prophet of national importance. He did not seek to…

“Now where Obscurity is, is also Curiosity. And Curiosity begets Rumour and Romance.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace
William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard

25 January 1876 – 2 May 1944 (~68)
2 live poems · English

On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…

“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Patrick Reginald Chalmers
William Ellery Leonard
1872 1944
They overlapped for 67 years (1876–1942). When William Ellery Leonard was born, Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 4. William Ellery Leonard was about 66 when Patrick Reginald Chalmers died.

On the map

About 5,290 km separate Brechin, Angus, Scotland from Plainfield, New Jersey, 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

social

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: brechin, angus, green days and blue days, a picker of pebbles, punch and judy, at the tail of the weir, the obsessive angler, rugby school. William Ellery Leonard: plainfield, new jersey, charlotte freeman, two lives, sonnets and poems, the lynching bee and other poems, agoraphobia, madison mob, boston university.

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 Lass I Love
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
73% love
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
71%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
The Lass I Love
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
69% life
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
If Flowers Had Ghosts
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
69%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
In March
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
67%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
The Faun
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
67%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace. William Ellery Leonard: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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