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

Louis MacNeice Louis MacNeice

Poet B

Lascelles Abercrombie Lascelles Abercrombie
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 73% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice

12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963 (~56)
1 live poem · English

Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907 in Belfast, the youngest child of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret Clesham. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who would later become a bishop, and the family moved shortly after Louis's birth to Carrickfergus, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where the boy grew up in the rectory beneath the squat Norman keep of the castle. It was an apparent…

“The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities
Lascelles Abercrombie

Lascelles Abercrombie

9 January 1881 – 27 October 1938 (~57)
1 live poem · English

In the verdant countryside of Victorian England, on January 9, 1881, a voice was born that would become one of the most distinctive—and contentious—in early twentieth-century British poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie arrived into a world still enchanted by Tennyson's melodies and Browning's dramatic monologues, yet he would live to witness the seismic upheavals of modernism, two world wars, and the transformation of poet…

“No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Louis MacNeice
Lascelles Abercrombie
1881 1963
They overlapped for 32 years (1907–1938). When Louis MacNeice was born, Lascelles Abercrombie was about 26. Louis MacNeice was about 31 when Lascelles Abercrombie died.
Louis MacNeice in history Lascelles Abercrombie in history Years they were given

On the map

About 270 km separate Belfast, Northern Ireland from Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, England. Both have ground in London.

Louis MacNeice

Lascelles Abercrombie

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

Louis MacNeice only

macneice world self prayer violence

Lascelles Abercrombie only

death perfection epitaph desire philosophical fortune freedom

From the biographies

Louis MacNeice: belfast, carrickfergus, william macneice, mary ezra, autumn journal, snow, letters from iceland, the dark tower. Lascelles Abercrombie: victorian england, ashton-upon-mersey, catherine gwatkin, interludes and poems, georgian poetry, dymock poets, emblems of love, the sale of st. thomas.

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.

Prayer Before Birth
Louis MacNeice
68% life
Compare
Epitaph
Lascelles Abercrombie

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1907 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
1908 Discovery of Oil at Masjid i-Sulaiman in Persia
1908 Ford Model T Introduced
1908 The Tunguska Event
1910 Jones is jailed after reaching Harvard Square
1911 Britannica Releases the Landmark Eleventh Edition
1911 Roald Amundsen Reaches the South Pole
1912 Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition

Louis MacNeice

1915 Louis MacNeice's Early Education Begins
1925 Louis MacNeice's First Published Work
1930 Louis MacNeice's Marriage to Mary McCulloch
1933 Louis MacNeice's Move to London
1938 Publication of 'The Earth Compels'
1939 Louis MacNeice's Friendship with W.H. Auden
1949 Publication of 'Collected Poems'
1960 Louis MacNeice's Final Years in Dublin

Lascelles Abercrombie

1908 Publication of 'Interludes and Poems'
1909 Marriage to Catherine Gwatkin
1910 Move to London
1914 Publication of 'The Dance of Death'
1916 Publication of 'A Book of Poems'
1920 Involvement in Literary Criticism
1922 Publication of 'The Poet's Testament'
1930 Publication of 'The Complete Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Louis MacNeice: Fear, Longing, Despair. Lascelles Abercrombie: Despair, Sorrow, Irony.

Skip to main content