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

Alfred Austin Alfred Austin

Poet B

John Boyle O'Reilly John Boyle O'Reilly
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 59% Poems 88% Blended 72%
Swap sides Another related pair
Alfred Austin

Alfred Austin

30 May 1835 – 2 June 1913 (~78)
17 live poems · English

Alfred Austin was born on 30 May 1835 at Headingley, then a village just outside Leeds in Yorkshire, and died on 2 June 1913 at Ashford, Kent. For seventeen years, from 1896 until his death, he held the conspicuous and difficult office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Yet his name has endured less securely than those of the poets who preceded and surrounded him. To later readers, Austin has often appeared chie…

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
John Boyle O'Reilly

John Boyle O'Reilly

28 June 1844 – 10 August 1890 (~46)
12 live poems · English

On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…

“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it cannot be enforced. This is a shameful truth, perhaps, but it is true.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow

In time

Alfred Austin
John Boyle O'Reilly
1835 1913
They overlapped for 47 years (1844–1890). When John Boyle O'Reilly was born, Alfred Austin was about 9. Alfred Austin was about 55 when John Boyle O'Reilly died.

On the map

About 323 km separate Leeds, Yorkshire, England from Dowth, County Meath, Ireland. 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

catholic

Alfred Austin: headingley, leeds, poet laureate, the garden that i love, the tower of babel, savonarola, stonyhurst college, lord salisbury. John Boyle O'Reilly: county meath, dowth castle, irish republican brotherhood, fenian movement, tenth hussars, boston pilot, father patrick mccabe, captain david r..

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.

When Acorns Fall
Alfred Austin
79% life
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
Nightingale and Cuckoo
Alfred Austin
78% pain
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
Gleaners of Fame
Alfred Austin
77%
Compare
Love, and be Wise
John Boyle O'Reilly
Gleaners of Fame
Alfred Austin
77%
Compare
What is Good
John Boyle O'Reilly
The Dregs of Love
Alfred Austin
76% love
Compare
Love, and be Wise
John Boyle O'Reilly
Nightingale and Cuckoo
Alfred Austin
76%
Compare
The Useless Ones
John Boyle O'Reilly

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Alfred Austin: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. John Boyle O'Reilly: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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