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

Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti

Poet B

Gerald Gould Gerald Gould
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 62% Poems 83% Blended 72%
Swap sides Another related pair
Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894 (~64)
68 live poems · English

To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…

“The world is full of suffering, but it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Gerald Gould

Gerald Gould

9 April 1885 – 2 November 1936 (~51)
2 live poems · English

In the landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…

“Instinct, as Falstaff said, is a great matter; but it is not the whole.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality

In time

Christina Rossetti
Gerald Gould
1830 1936
They overlapped for 10 years (1885–1894). When Gerald Gould was born, Christina Rossetti was about 55. Gerald Gould was about 9 when Christina Rossetti died.

On the map

About 307 km separate 38 Charlotte Street, London, England from Scarborough, England. Both have ground in London and 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

Christina Rossetti: pre-raphaelite brotherhood, goblin market, the girlhood of mary virgin, dante gabriel rossetti, james collinson, charles bagot cayley, anglo-catholic, sing-song: a nursery rhyme book. Gerald Gould: norwich, barbara ayrton, georgian poet, lyrics, an essay on the nature of lyric, united suffragists, men's league for women's suffrage, the happy tree and other poems.

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.

Confluents
Christina Rossetti
77% beloved, love
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Somewhere or Other
Christina Rossetti
76% longing
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
Confluents
Christina Rossetti
76% longing
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
Spring Quiet
Christina Rossetti
75% world
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
One Day
Christina Rossetti
75% love, world
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Fata Morgana
Christina Rossetti
74% desire
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Christina Rossetti: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.

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