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

D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence

Poet B

Kahlil Gibran Kahlil Gibran
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
D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930 (~45)
59 live poems · English

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at 8a Victoria Street in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, an English coal-mining town whose physical landscape, class divisions, and social pressures would remain central to his imagination. He was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a coal miner, and Lydia Beardsall Lawrence, née Beardsall, a former pupil-teacher from a family with stronger educational and middle-…

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow
Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran

6 January 1883 – 10 April 1931 (~48)
5 live poems · English

Kahlil Gibran, born on 6 January 1883 in the mountain town of Bsharri, in what is now northern Lebanon, and dead on 10 April 1931 in New York City, became one of the most widely read literary figures of the twentieth century. He was a poet, prose writer, essayist, painter, draftsman, cultural critic, and immigrant intellectual whose work traveled between Arabic and English, Lebanon and the United States, Christianity…

“Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Arabic Poets, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder

In time

D. H. Lawrence
Kahlil Gibran
1883 1931
They overlapped for 46 years (1885–1930). When D. H. Lawrence was born, Kahlil Gibran was about 2. Kahlil Gibran was about 47 when D. H. Lawrence died.

On the map

About 3,594 km separate Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England from Bsharri, Lebanon. 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

social

D. H. Lawrence: eastwood, nottinghamshire, sons and lovers, the rainbow, frieda weekley, jesse chambers, ford madox ford, georgian pastoralism. Kahlil Gibran: bsharri, lebanon, new york city, the prophet, arab émigré literary movement, kamila rahmeh, khalil sa‘d gibran, mary elizabeth haskell.

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.

Song of a Man Who Is Not Loved
D. H. Lawrence
75%
Compare
Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
Song of a Man Who Is Loved
D. H. Lawrence
74%
Compare
Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
Bei Hennef
D. H. Lawrence
74% life
Compare
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
A Pang of Reminiscence
D. H. Lawrence
74% tear
Compare
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
Bei Hennef
D. H. Lawrence
73%
Compare
On Talking
Kahlil Gibran

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

D. H. Lawrence: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow. Kahlil Gibran: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.

Skip to main content