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

William Brighty Rands William Brighty Rands

Poet B

Patrick Reginald Chalmers Patrick Reginald Chalmers
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 69% Poems 86% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Brighty Rands

William Brighty Rands

24 December 1823 – 23 April 1882 (~59)
2 live poems · English

William Brighty Rands was born on 24 December 1823, in Chelsea, then a district on the western edge of London and already a place where commerce, domestic life, artistic ambition, and metropolitan poverty met in close quarters. He died on 23 April 1882, having lived only fifty-eight years, and his name is now far less familiar than the names of several Victorian writers whose work has dated more severely. Yet Rands o…

“I was taught by my parents that, if I was struck on the right cheek, I should turn the left, and that I was to die rather than smite again. I never struck a blow and never received one, and I used to believe firmly that an angel from heaven would help me if I needed it.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony
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…

“For what makes more for the enjoyment of a day’s shooting than the gun-dog?”

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

In time

William Brighty Rands
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
1823 1942
They overlapped for 11 years (1872–1882). When Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born, William Brighty Rands was about 49. Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 10 when William Brighty Rands died.

On the map

About 605 km separate Chelsea, London, England from Brechin, Angus, Scotland. Both have ground in 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

social

William Brighty Rands: chelsea, victorian children's literature, lilliput levee, matthew browne, lilliput lectures, court of chancery, industrial revolution, legal writing. 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.

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.

I am the cat of cats
William Brighty Rands
82% animal
Compare
The Tortoiseshell Cat
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
I am the cat of cats
William Brighty Rands
80% imaginative
Compare
The Gardener's Cat
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
The Flowers
William Brighty Rands
79% flowers, beauty
Compare
If Flowers Had Ghosts
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
The Flowers
William Brighty Rands
73% world, beauty
Compare
When Mary Goes Walking
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
The Flowers
William Brighty Rands
72% world
Compare
In March
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
I am the cat of cats
William Brighty Rands
70%
Compare
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Brighty Rands: Joy, Wonder, Irony. Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace.

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