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.

I want a simpler life, without the hassle of being online. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the life I want.

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

Charles Williams Charles Williams

Poet B

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams
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 79% Poems 85% Blended 82%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Williams

Charles Williams

20 September 1886 – 15 May 1945 (~59)
3 live poems · English

On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…

“Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
Listen Timeline Affinities
William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

17 September 1883 – 4 March 1963 (~80)
2 live poems · English

William Carlos Williams was born on 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, and died there on 4 March 1963. Few American writers made such a compelling argument, through both their lives and their art, that poetry could be found not in a remote ideal realm but in the streets outside one’s door, in a patient’s anxious face, in a backyard garden, in a refrigerator, or beside a muddy chicken yard. He was a physicia…

“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Charles Williams
William Carlos Williams
1883 1963
They overlapped for 60 years (1886–1945). When Charles Williams was born, William Carlos Williams was about 3. William Carlos Williams was about 62 when Charles Williams died.
Charles Williams in history William Carlos Williams in history Years they were given

On the map

About 5,570 km separate Islington, London, England from Rutherford, New Jersey, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Charles Williams

William Carlos Williams

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

Charles Williams only

world friendship friends speech reunion friend rivers eyes dark gaze love spiritual

William Carlos Williams only

wheelbarrow rain chickens farm domestic animal mujer persian

From the biographies

Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell. William Carlos Williams: rutherford, new jersey, no ideas but in things, ezra pound, h.d., imagism, the young housewife, the red wheelbarrow.

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.

Her Dark Eyes Sparkle
Charles Williams
76%
Compare
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
Reunion
Charles Williams
73%
Compare
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
The Assumption
Charles Williams
71% life
Compare
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
The Assumption
Charles Williams
70% life
Compare
Mujer
William Carlos Williams
Reunion
Charles Williams
65%
Compare
Mujer
William Carlos Williams
Her Dark Eyes Sparkle
Charles Williams
64%
Compare
Mujer
William Carlos Williams

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1886 Coca-Cola invented by John Pemberton in Atlanta
1886 Discovery of Gold on the Witwatersrand Sparks Johannesburg Boom
1886 Emily Dickinson's Posthumous Discovery by Sister Lavinia
1891 Conversion to Roman Catholicism
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

Charles Williams

1902 Scholarship to University College London
1908 Joining Oxford University Press
1917 Initiation into the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross
1919 Publication of 'The Silver Stair'
1931 Publication of 'The Greater Trumps'
1938 Publication of Taliessin through Logres
1939 Evacuation to Oxford with Oxford University Press
1943 Honorary Master of Arts from Oxford University

William Carlos Williams

1902 Education at the University of Pennsylvania
1912 Marriage to Florence Herman
1913 Publication of 'The Tempers'
1914 Birth of First Child, William Carlos Williams Jr.
1923 Publication of 'Spring and All'
1946 Publication of 'Paterson'
1950 Awarded the National Book Award
1962 Final Publication of 'Pictures from Brueghel'

Emotional landscapes

Charles Williams: Tenderness, Longing, Joy. William Carlos Williams: Tenderness, Wonder, Peace.

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