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.

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

Maxwell Bodenheim Maxwell Bodenheim

Poet B

Arthur Symons Arthur Symons
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 68% Poems 87% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Maxwell Bodenheim

Maxwell Bodenheim

26 May 1892 – 6 February 1954 (~62)
2 live poems · English

Maxwell Bodenheim's life reads like one of his own feverish poems—raw, defiant, laced with startling imagery, and shadowed by a restless hunger for freedom that both illuminated and destroyed him. Born into the humid anonymity of a small Southern town, he rose to become the self-crowned King of Greenwich Village bohemians during the glittering, gin-soaked Jazz Age, only to tumble into poverty, ridicule, and a violent…

“If one really believes that something is negligible and digging its own grave one becomes genuinely indifferent toward it.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Decadent Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities
Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 – 22 January 1945 (~80)
23 live poems · English

Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…

“Unfortunately, words can convey facts; unfortunately, people in general have an ill-regulated but insatiable appetite for facts.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Maxwell Bodenheim
Arthur Symons
1865 1954
They overlapped for 54 years (1892–1945). When Maxwell Bodenheim was born, Arthur Symons was about 27. Maxwell Bodenheim was about 53 when Arthur Symons died.
Maxwell Bodenheim in history Arthur Symons in history Years they were given

On the map

About 7,006 km separate Hermanville, Mississippi, USA from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Arthur Symons

Open both on the History Atlas

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

life urban eyes

Maxwell Bodenheim only

death mortality erotic village friendliness street city

Arthur Symons only

world love woman beauty desire light memory beloved face self reality consciousness

From the biographies

urban

Maxwell Bodenheim: hermanville, greenwich village, jazz age, minna and myself, ben hecht, chicago renaissance, others anthology, the shop. Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats.

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.

Figure
Maxwell Bodenheim
84% urban
Compare
The Blind Beggar
Arthur Symons
Death
Maxwell Bodenheim
81%
Compare
For a Picture of Watteau
Arthur Symons
Death
Maxwell Bodenheim
81% life
Compare
L'Amour Par Terre
Arthur Symons
Death
Maxwell Bodenheim
79%
Compare
The Last Exit
Arthur Symons
Figure
Maxwell Bodenheim
79% life, urban
Compare
At the Haymarket
Arthur Symons
Death
Maxwell Bodenheim
78%
Compare
A White Night
Arthur Symons

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1892 Opening of Ellis Island
1892 Valéry undergoes the Genoa crisis
1893 Co-founding of the Gaelic League
1893 Delivery of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland' Speech
1893 Publication of 'The Hound of Heaven'
1894 Death of Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Valéry begins his lifelong notebooks
1895 Publication of 'The Red Badge of Courage'

Maxwell Bodenheim

1916 First Published Work
1920 Emergence as a Bohemian Leader
1921 Publication of 'The New Poetry'
1924 Separation from Ruth
1925 Involvement in the Harlem Renaissance
1927 Publication of 'The Book of Poems'
1930 Financial Struggles and Decline
1932 Publication of 'The Lost Poet'

Arthur Symons

1880 Extensive Travels in France and Italy
1889 Publication of 'Days and Nights'
1895 Publication of 'London Nights'
1896 Symons Edits The Savoy Magazine
1899 Publication of 'The Symbolist Movement in Literature'
1900 Travel to Paris and Influence of French Culture
1901 Marriage to Rhoda Bowser
1908 Mental Breakdown in Italy

Emotional landscapes

Maxwell Bodenheim: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

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