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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poet B

Ernst Stadler Ernst Stadler
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 73% Poems 86% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832 (~83)
2 live poems · German

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and dead 22 March 1832 in Weimar, became during his own lifetime a European institution: poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, civil servant, theater director, scientific investigator, memoirist, and theorist of culture. To call him Germany’s greatest writer is conventional but not empty praise. Goethe helped give the German language a literary authori…

“Before trusting a new acquaintance, you must first have eaten a bushel of salt with them.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, German Romantics, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
Ernst Stadler

Ernst Stadler

11 August 1883 – 30 October 1914 (~31)
2 live poems · German

Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in German-language literature is out of proportion to its size. Stadler stands among the decisive early voices of Expr…

“I am astonished and delighted at once. I can hardly have deserved it: my military qualities are certainly not exceptional. I owe it chiefly to the captain's kindness.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, German Romantics
Emotional landscape: Longing, Fear, Sensuality

In time

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ernst Stadler
1749 1914
Their lives did not overlap. 51 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 246 km separate Frankfurt, Germany from Colmar, Alsace, France. 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

french

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: frankfurt am main, weimar, sturm und drang, the sorrows of young werther, götz von berlichingen, anna katharina schönkopf, friederike brion, charlotte von stein. Ernst Stadler: colmar, alsace, first world war, der aufbruch, expressionism, oxford, walt whitman, strasbourg.

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.

Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
80% love, desire
Compare
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
78% death
Compare
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
76% world, death
Compare
Der Aufbruch
Ernst Stadler
Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
74% heart
Compare
Der Aufbruch
Ernst Stadler

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. Ernst Stadler: Longing, Fear, Sensuality.

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