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

Fenton Johnson Fenton Johnson
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 56% Poems 83% Blended 68%
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-…

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow
Fenton Johnson

Fenton Johnson

7 May 1888 – 17 September 1958 (~70)
2 live poems · English

In the sunlit streets of late-19th-century Chicago, where the Great Lakes breezes carried the promise of industry and the distant echoes of Southern migrations, Fenton Johnson entered the world on May 7, 1888. He would leave it on September 17, 1958, in the same city that had cradled his ambitions and tested his spirit, his seventy years a testament to the restless genius of an artist who refused to be confined by th…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Peace

In time

D. H. Lawrence
Fenton Johnson
1885 1958
They overlapped for 43 years (1888–1930). When Fenton Johnson was born, D. H. Lawrence was about 3. Fenton Johnson was about 42 when D. H. Lawrence died.

On the map

About 6,206 km separate Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England from Chicago, Illinois, USA. 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

D. H. Lawrence: eastwood, nottinghamshire, sons and lovers, the rainbow, frieda weekley, jesse chambers, ford madox ford, georgian pastoralism. Fenton Johnson: chicago, harlem renaissance, elijah johnson, jesse taylor johnson, a little dreaming, visions of the dusk, songs of the soil, tired.

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.

And Oh That the Man I Am Might Cease to Be—
D. H. Lawrence
74%
Compare
Tired
Fenton Johnson
Bei Hennef
D. H. Lawrence
74% love, life, world
Compare
Declaration
Fenton Johnson
Noise of Battle
D. H. Lawrence
74%
Compare
Tired
Fenton Johnson
Dog-Tired
D. H. Lawrence
74% world
Compare
Declaration
Fenton Johnson
A Love Song
D. H. Lawrence
73% love
Compare
Declaration
Fenton Johnson
The Risen Lord
D. H. Lawrence
73% life
Compare
Declaration
Fenton Johnson

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. Fenton Johnson: Sorrow, Despair, Peace.

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