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

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope

Poet B

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri
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 62% Blended 62%
Swap sides Another related pair
Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744 (~56)
6 live poems · English

Alexander Pope, born on 21 May 1688 and dead on 30 May 1744, was the supreme English poet of the Augustan age and one of the most technically accomplished writers in the language. His verse made the heroic couplet seem at once inevitable, conversational, polished, and inexhaustibly flexible. In his best work, a pair of rhyming pentameter lines can carry an argument, a joke, a moral judgment, a portrait, a burst of in…

“the Philosopher and even the Man of the world may be Born, as well as the Poet.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri

c. May 1265 – 14 September 1321 (~56)
1 live poem · Italian

In the spring of 1265, beneath the shadow of Florence's rising towers, a child was born who would revolutionize not merely Italian literature but the entire Western imagination. Dante Alighieri entered a world of political turmoil, theological ferment, and artistic flowering, and he would spend his fifty-six years transforming personal anguish into universal art, political exile into cosmic vision, and earthly love i…

“In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little to read, there is a heading which says: Here begins a new life.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Italian Renaissance Poets, Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing

In time

Alexander Pope
Dante Alighieri
1265 1744
Their lives did not overlap. 367 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 1,207 km separate Plough Court, Lombard Street, London, England from Florence, Italy. 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

Alexander Pope: augustan age, heroic couplet, an essay on criticism, the rape of the lock, twickenham, john dryden, scriblerus club, spinal tuberculosis. Dante Alighieri: florence, divine comedy, beatrice portinari, vita nuova, guido cavalcanti, black guelphs, white guelphs, de monarchia.

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.

The Dying Christian to his Soul
Alexander Pope
71% soul, spiritual
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Prayer of St. Francis Xavier
Alexander Pope
70% love, divine
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Ode on Solitude
Alexander Pope
65%
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Sound and Sense
Alexander Pope
62%
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Alexander Pope: Joy, Peace, Wonder. Dante Alighieri: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing.

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