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

John Crowe Ransom John Crowe Ransom

Poet B

Isaac Rosenberg Isaac Rosenberg
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 70% Poems 87% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom

30 April 1888 – 3 July 1974 (~86)
4 live poems · English

John Crowe Ransom stood at the crossroads of American poetry and criticism in the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extended far beyond the elegant verses he composed. Born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee, he would become the architect of a critical revolution, the mentor to some of America's finest poets, and the principal voice of a distinctly Southern literary aesthetic that sought to reconcile…

“Here is contemporary literature, waiting for its criticism; where are the professors of literature?”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

25 November 1890 – 1 April 1918 (~28)
4 live poems · English

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 and killed in France on 1 April 1918, at the age of twenty-seven. His brief life has come to seem almost emblematic of a generation interrupted by the First World War, yet his achievement cannot be understood merely as the achievement of a “war poet.” Rosenberg was also a painter, draughtsman, reader, self-educator, son of Jewish immigrants, East End Londoner, a…

“I am not a poet, I am a painter.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Fear

In time

John Crowe Ransom
Isaac Rosenberg
1888 1974
They overlapped for 29 years (1890–1918). When Isaac Rosenberg was born, John Crowe Ransom was about 2. John Crowe Ransom was about 30 when Isaac Rosenberg died.

On the map

About 6,670 km separate Pulaski, Tennessee, USA from Bristol, England. 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

John Crowe Ransom: pulaski, tennessee, john james ransom, ella crowe ransom, vanderbilt university, fugitive group, the fugitive, allen tate, robert penn warren. Isaac Rosenberg: bristol, first world war, jewish immigrants, east end london, stepney, whitechapel, night and day, break of day in the trenches.

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.

Features of Creatures
John Crowe Ransom
77% world
Compare
Significance
Isaac Rosenberg
Her Eyes
John Crowe Ransom
76% eyes
Compare
The Female God
Isaac Rosenberg
Her Eyes
John Crowe Ransom
74% life
Compare
Significance
Isaac Rosenberg
Bells for John Whitesides' Daughter
John Crowe Ransom
74% death, life
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
Here Lies a Lady
John Crowe Ransom
73%
Compare
Significance
Isaac Rosenberg
Features of Creatures
John Crowe Ransom
73% world
Compare
Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Crowe Ransom: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Isaac Rosenberg: Sorrow, Despair, Fear.

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