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

Stephen Vincent Benét Stephen Vincent Benét

Poet B

Mark Van Doren Mark Van Doren
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 74% Poems 82% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Stephen Vincent Benét

Stephen Vincent Benét

22 July 1898 – 13 March 1943 (~45)
2 live poems · English

Stephen Vincent Benét was a poet, novelist, and storyteller whose voice captured the sprawling, contradictory soul of America with a warmth and vigor that few writers of his era could match. In an age when modernism often turned inward toward fragmentation and irony, Benét looked outward, embracing history, folklore, and the ordinary heroism of everyday people. His words thrum with the crack of rifles at Harpers Ferr…

“We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy—the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities
Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren

13 June 1894 – 10 December 1972 (~78)
2 live poems · English

Mark Van Doren came into the world on June 13, 1894, in the small farming community of Hope, Illinois, the fourth of five sons born to Dr. Charles Lucius Van Doren, a dedicated country doctor of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Eudora Ann Butz, a woman of formidable spirit who had once delivered mail on horseback across the open prairies. The Van Doren household pulsed with the rhythms of rural life—plowing fields, tendi…

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Stephen Vincent Benét
Mark Van Doren
1894 1972
They overlapped for 46 years (1898–1943). When Stephen Vincent Benét was born, Mark Van Doren was about 4. Mark Van Doren was about 49 when Stephen Vincent Benét died.
Stephen Vincent Benét in history Mark Van Doren in history Years they were given

On the map

About 1,061 km separate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA from Hope, Illinois, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Mark Van Doren

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

Stephen Vincent Benét only

love innovator pyramid tradition innovation mind praise

Mark Van Doren only

thunder storm spring hedge nature renewal trembling self mountain identity ordinary consciousness

From the biographies

pulitzer prize

Stephen Vincent Benét: fountain hill, harpers ferry, john brown's body, rosemary carr, pulitzer prize, the devil and daniel webster, yale university, william rose benét. Mark Van Doren: hope, illinois, urband, carl van doren, dorothy graffe, spring thunder, jonathan gentry, a winter diary, pulitzer prize.

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.

American Names
Stephen Vincent Benét
76% world
Compare
Identity
Mark Van Doren
American Names
Stephen Vincent Benét
72% world
Compare
Spring Thunder
Mark Van Doren
The Innovator
Stephen Vincent Benét
67%
Compare
Identity
Mark Van Doren
The Innovator
Stephen Vincent Benét
65%
Compare
Spring Thunder
Mark Van Doren

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1898 Crane's Experience in the Spanish-American War
1901 Establishment of the Nobel Prizes
1902 The Wright 1902 glider achieves practical three-axis control
1903 Publication of 'The Path of Dreams'
1903 Publication of 'The Souls of Black Folk'
1903 Wright Brothers Achieve First Powered Flight Using Wind Tunnel Research
1906 Appointment as editor of Punch
1906 Upton Sinclair Publishes 'The Jungle'

Stephen Vincent Benét

1922 Marriage to Elinor Wylie
1928 Publication of 'John Brown's Body'
1929 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1930 Relocation to New York City
1936 Publication of 'The Devil and Daniel Webster'
1944 Second Pulitzer Prize for 'Western Star'

Mark Van Doren

1911 Education at the University of Illinois
1921 Teaching at Columbia University
1923 Marriage to Helen Van Doren
1939 Publication of 'The Poetry of the New World'
1941 Publication of 'The Great American Poet'
1944 Publication of 'Collected Poems'
1948 Awarded the Bollingen Prize
1972 Death of Mark Van Doren

Emotional landscapes

Stephen Vincent Benét: Sorrow, Irony, Despair. Mark Van Doren: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.

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