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

Josephine Preston Peabody Josephine Preston Peabody

Poet B

Trumbull Stickney Trumbull Stickney
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 67% Poems 81% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
Josephine Preston Peabody

Josephine Preston Peabody

30 May 1874 – 4 December 1922 (~48)
2 live poems · English

Josephine Preston Peabody, later Josephine Preston Peabody Marks, was born in New York City on 30 May 1874 and died on 4 December 1922. During her comparatively short life she became one of the most admired American poets and verse dramatists of the early twentieth century. She was praised for a voice at once musical, delicate, morally serious, and theatrically ambitious. Her poetry moved easily among childhood, myth…

“Oh, why was I born with a thousand wings of the spirit and a ball and chain on every hand and foot of me?”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality
Trumbull Stickney

Trumbull Stickney

20 June 1874 – 11 October 1904 (~30)
2 live poems · English

Joseph Trumbull Stickney, known almost always as Trumbull Stickney, was born on 20 June 1874 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Boston on 11 October 1904. His brief life, ending when he was only thirty, has encouraged the familiar image of the doomed young poet whose promise exceeds his surviving achievement. That image is not wholly wrong, but it is too simple. Stickney was not merely a promising lyricist interrupt…

“You refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing

In time

Josephine Preston Peabody
Trumbull Stickney
1874 1922
They overlapped for 31 years (1874–1904). They were born in the same year. Josephine Preston Peabody was about 30 when Trumbull Stickney died.

On the map

About 6,217 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Geneva, Switzerland. Both have ground in Massachusetts.

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

george santayana boston

Josephine Preston Peabody: new york city, dorchester, the piper, lionel s. marks, the singing leaves, the wayfarers, radcliffe college, george santayana. Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies.

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 Enchanted Sheep-Fold
Josephine Preston Peabody
74% world
Compare
In the Past
Trumbull Stickney
The Enchanted Sheep-Fold
Josephine Preston Peabody
72% world
Compare
Live blindly and upon the hour
Trumbull Stickney
The Reed
Josephine Preston Peabody
72%
Compare
Live blindly and upon the hour
Trumbull Stickney
The Reed
Josephine Preston Peabody
71% heart
Compare
In the Past
Trumbull Stickney

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Josephine Preston Peabody: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.

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