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

Arthur Symons Arthur Symons

Poet B

J.M. Synge J.M. Synge
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 67% Poems 88% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 – 22 January 1945 (~80)
23 live poems · English

Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…

“Sometimes I say to myself, How great a burden of love is taken off my heart! It is horrible to have one's heart in an even balance.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
J.M. Synge

J.M. Synge

16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909 (~38)
6 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures cast as long a shadow as John Millington Synge, a man who compressed into his brief thirty-seven years a literary output that would reshape the very notion of Irish dramatic art. Born on April 16, 1871, into the comfortable Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry of County Dublin, Synge would grow to become one of Ireland's most celebrated and controversial playwrights, creating…

“The poetry of the drama is not in the words, but in the situation.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow

In time

Arthur Symons
J.M. Synge
1865 1945
They overlapped for 39 years (1871–1909). When J.M. Synge was born, Arthur Symons was about 6. Arthur Symons was about 44 when J.M. Synge died.

On the map

About 200 km separate Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales from Dublin, Ireland. 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

Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats. J.M. Synge: county dublin, trinity college dublin, the aran islands, william butler yeats, hodgkin's disease, in the shadow of the glen, riders to the sea, the playboy of the western world.

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.

After Love
Arthur Symons
81% love, beloved
Compare
A Question
J.M. Synge
The Last Exit
Arthur Symons
79%
Compare
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
L'Amour Par Terre
Arthur Symons
78% life
Compare
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
In the Oratory
Arthur Symons
77% religious
Compare
Dread
J.M. Synge
The Last Exit
Arthur Symons
76% love
Compare
A Question
J.M. Synge

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. J.M. Synge: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.

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