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.

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

Elizabeth Stoddard Elizabeth Stoddard

Poet B

Mary Coleridge Mary Coleridge
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 74% Poems 86% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Elizabeth Stoddard

Elizabeth Stoddard

6 May 1823 – 1 August 1902 (~79)
2 live poems · English

On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…

“I must own that I am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of truth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality
Mary Coleridge

Mary Coleridge

23 September 1861 – 25 August 1907 (~46)
8 live poems · English

In the twilight of the Victorian era, when the literary world was dominated by towering figures like Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, a quieter voice emerged from the shadows of London's Hyde Park Square. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, born on September 23, 1861, would prove to be one of the most intriguing and underappreciated literary figures of her generation. Her life, spanning forty-six years until her death on Aug…

“How many a born king spends his whole life in the pursuit of asses for want of some kind prophet to tell him he is a head and shoulders taller than other people.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Love Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair

In time

Elizabeth Stoddard
Mary Coleridge
1823 1907
They overlapped for 42 years (1861–1902). When Mary Coleridge was born, Elizabeth Stoddard was about 38. Mary Coleridge was about 41 when Elizabeth Stoddard died.

On the map

About 5,292 km separate Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, USA from Hyde Park Square, London, England. 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

women

Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary. Mary Coleridge: london, hyde park square, samuel taylor coleridge, anodos, fancy's following, the king with two faces, christina rossetti, richard watson dixon.

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.

November
Elizabeth Stoddard
79% nature
Compare
Furness Abbey
Mary Coleridge
November
Elizabeth Stoddard
79%
Compare
Contradictions
Mary Coleridge
A Landscape
Elizabeth Stoddard
77% nature
Compare
Furness Abbey
Mary Coleridge
November
Elizabeth Stoddard
76%
Compare
I ask of thee, love, nothing but relief
Mary Coleridge
November
Elizabeth Stoddard
75% nature
Compare
The Witches' Wood
Mary Coleridge
A Landscape
Elizabeth Stoddard
75% death
Compare
Contradictions
Mary Coleridge

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality. Mary Coleridge: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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