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

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Poet B

Charles Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire
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 72% Poems 79% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

1836 – 1870 (~34)
2 live poems · Spanish

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida on February 17, 1836, in Seville, and dead in Madrid on December 22, 1870, became one of the most beloved and influential voices in Spanish poetry despite publishing no definitive collection of his poems during his lifetime. His reputation rests chiefly on the Rimas, brief lyric poems of extraordinary intimacy, and the Leyendas, prose tales in whic…

“Love is poetry; religion is love. Two things resembling a third are equal to each other.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder
Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867 (~46)
4 live poems · French

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…

“La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Charles Baudelaire
1821 1870
They overlapped for 32 years (1836–1867). When Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was born, Charles Baudelaire was about 15. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was about 31 when Charles Baudelaire died.

On the map

About 1,441 km separate Seville, Andalusia, Spain from Paris, Île-de-France, France. 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

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: seville, madrid, rimas, leyendas, valeriano bécquer, jose domínguez insausti, manuela monahay, narciso campillo. Charles Baudelaire: paris, les fleurs du mal, jeanne duval, decadence, prose poetry, eugène delacroix, lycée louis-le-grand, mauritius.

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.

Rima XXI
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
72%
Compare
Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
Rima LIII
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
72% world
Compare
Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
Rima LIII
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
71% world
Compare
Spleen
Charles Baudelaire
Rima XXI
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
71% beauty
Compare
Les Métamorphoses du vampire
Charles Baudelaire
Rima LIII
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
69% beauty, world
Compare
L'Albatros
Charles Baudelaire
Rima XXI
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
68%
Compare
Spleen
Charles Baudelaire

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Charles Baudelaire: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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