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

Arthur Symons Arthur Symons

Poet B

Elizabeth Stoddard Elizabeth Stoddard
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 61% Poems 85% Blended 72%
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…

“To see the world in a grain of sand is not merely a poet’s phrase, but the very secret of poetry.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities
Elizabeth Stoddard

Elizabeth Stoddard

6 May 1823 – 1 August 1902 (~79)
2 live poems · English

On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…

“As I have not many good qualities of disposition I feel sure of this, which as many a member of my family have told me, makes me often hateful. My father said once he never saw any human being with such a talent for the disagreeable.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Arthur Symons
Elizabeth Stoddard
1823 1945
They overlapped for 38 years (1865–1902). When Arthur Symons was born, Elizabeth Stoddard was about 42. Arthur Symons was about 37 when Elizabeth Stoddard died.
Arthur Symons in history Elizabeth Stoddard in history Years they were given

On the map

About 4,963 km separate Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Arthur Symons

Elizabeth Stoddard

Open both on the History Atlas

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

world beauty life

Arthur Symons only

love woman desire light eyes memory beloved face self urban reality consciousness

Elizabeth Stoddard only

nature november autumn loss philosophical tradition landscape birds death spring return

From the biographies

Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats. Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary.

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.

Her Street
Arthur Symons
82%
Compare
A Landscape
Elizabeth Stoddard
For a Picture of Watteau
Arthur Symons
79% autumn
Compare
November
Elizabeth Stoddard
L'Amour Par Terre
Arthur Symons
78% life
Compare
A Landscape
Elizabeth Stoddard
L'Amour Par Terre
Arthur Symons
78% beauty
Compare
November
Elizabeth Stoddard
For a Picture of Watteau
Arthur Symons
78%
Compare
A Landscape
Elizabeth Stoddard
Maquillage
Arthur Symons
78% beauty
Compare
November
Elizabeth Stoddard

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1865 Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
1865 Publication of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'
1865 Surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox
1865 Thirteenth Amendment Ratified
1868 Fourteenth Amendment Ratified
1868 The Helium Discovery Eclipse
1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall

Arthur Symons

1880 Extensive Travels in France and Italy
1889 Publication of 'Days and Nights'
1895 Publication of 'London Nights'
1896 Symons Edits The Savoy Magazine
1899 Publication of 'The Symbolist Movement in Literature'
1900 Travel to Paris and Influence of French Culture
1901 Marriage to Rhoda Bowser
1908 Mental Breakdown in Italy

Elizabeth Stoddard

1841 Move to New York City
1850 Marriage to James H. Stoddard
1862 Publication of 'The Morgesons'
1865 Publication of 'Two Men'
1870 Move to San Francisco
1874 Publication of 'The Story of the Morgesons'
1886 Publication of 'The Old Woman'

Emotional landscapes

Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality.

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