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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Poet B

Joseph Blanco White Joseph Blanco White
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.

Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 53% Blended 53%
Swap sides Another related pair
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861 (~55)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…

“Writing poetry requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of itself.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness
Joseph Blanco White

Joseph Blanco White

11 July 1775 – 20 May 1841 (~66)
1 live poem · English

Joseph Blanco White was born José María Blanco y Crespo on the 11th of July, 1775, in a house on a street corner in the old Jewish quarter of Seville, not far from the city's great cathedral. He would die sixty-five years later, in May 1841, in Liverpool, a city about as different from sun-bleached Andalusia as nineteenth-century Europe could offer, and the distance between those two places, geographic and spiritual,…

“I now rejoice at the approach of Sunday. This very morning while at Chapel, I had the strongest and deepest conviction that I had never witnessed anything so really sublime as the whole worship in which I was joining. In a word, the whole service is a reality.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality

In time

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Joseph Blanco White
1775 1861
They overlapped for 36 years (1806–1841). When Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born, Joseph Blanco White was about 31. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was about 35 when Joseph Blanco White died.

On the map

About 1,948 km separate Durham, England from Seville, Andalusia, Spain. 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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning only

Joseph Blanco White only

From the biographies

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: county durham, hope end, the battle of marathon, the seraphim and other poems, the cry of the children, robert browning, sonnets from the portuguese, aurora leigh. Joseph Blanco White: seville, liverpool, roman catholic priest, unitarianism, el español, manuel de arjona, observations on heresy and orthodoxy, doblado's letters from spain.

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 Prospect
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
79% life, death
Compare
Night and Death
Joseph Blanco White
How Do I Love Thee?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
68%
Compare
Night and Death
Joseph Blanco White

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness. Joseph Blanco White: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality.

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