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

John Webster John Webster

Poet B

John Ford John Ford
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 75% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Webster

John Webster

c. 1580 – c. 1632 (~52)
1 live poem · English

John Webster, born around 1580 and probably dead by about 1632, occupies a singular place in English Renaissance drama. He is remembered above all as the author of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, tragedies whose violent plots, dense imagery, and moral unease have made them enduring fixtures of the theatrical canon. Yet the familiar image of Webster as a solitary poet of skulls, stranglings, poison, and corr…

“A great part of the grace of this, I confess, lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of the language, and ingenious structure of the scene, arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
John Ford

John Ford

17 April 1586 – c. 1639 (~53)
2 live poems · English

John Ford, baptized on 17 April 1586 and last securely documented in 1639, was one of the most daring and emotionally penetrating dramatists of England’s late Renaissance. Although he is commonly remembered as a playwright rather than as a poet in the narrower sense, poetry is inseparable from his dramatic achievement. His finest plays are built from a grave, musical, concentrated blank verse that gives private suffe…

“True gentility is ever accompanied with her inseparable adjunct, singular humanity.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow

In time

John Webster
John Ford
1580 1639
They overlapped for 47 years (1586–1632). When John Ford was born, John Webster was about 6. John Ford was about 46 when John Webster died.

On the map

About 272 km separate London, England from Ilsington, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

thomas dekker plays play drama social tragedies

John Webster: the white devil, the duchess of malfi, london, merchant taylors' company, thomas dekker, jacobean tragedy, red bull theatre, blackfriars theatre. John Ford: bagtor, exeter college, middle temple, the witch of edmonton, the lover's melancholy, love's sacrifice, the broken heart, 'tis pity she's a whore.

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.

Vanitas Vanitatum
John Webster
76%
Compare
Beauty's Beauty
John Ford
Vanitas Vanitatum
John Webster
75% life, death
Compare
Oh, no more, no more
John Ford

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Webster: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. John Ford: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.

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