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

Henry Augustin Beers Henry Augustin Beers

Poet B

John Kenyon John Kenyon
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
Henry Augustin Beers

Henry Augustin Beers

2 July 1847 – 7 September 1926 (~79)
1 live poem · English

In the long history of American literary scholarship, few figures embody the transition from nineteenth-century genteel letters to modern academic criticism as thoroughly as Henry Augustin Beers. Born on July 2, 1847, in Buffalo, New York, and dying on September 7, 1926, in New Haven, Connecticut, Beers spent nearly his entire adult life at Yale University, where his slight frame became a beloved fixture on campus fo…

“He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a world-poet.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities
John Kenyon

John Kenyon

2 December 1784 – 3 December 1856 (~72)
1 live poem · English

John Kenyon, born on 2 December 1784 in Trelawny Parish, Jamaica, and dead on 3 December 1856 at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, was a minor poet of the Romantic and early Victorian periods but a major presence in the social history of English literature. His own poems, polished, conscientious, and occasionally touching, have never commanded the attention given to the work of his celebrated friends. Yet Kenyon’s life mat…

Neighbourhood: Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Sensuality, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Henry Augustin Beers
John Kenyon
1784 1926
They overlapped for 10 years (1847–1856). When Henry Augustin Beers was born, John Kenyon was about 63. Henry Augustin Beers was about 9 when John Kenyon died.
Henry Augustin Beers in history John Kenyon in history Years they were given

On the map

About 2,729 km separate Buffalo, New York, USA from Trelawny, Jamaica. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Henry Augustin Beers

John Kenyon

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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

Henry Augustin Beers only

wilderness forest revelation secret

John Kenyon only

champagne kenyon wine death pleasure styx rosée

From the biographies

Henry Augustin Beers: buffalo, new york, new haven, connecticut, yale university, mary florence heaton, james russell lowell, ralph waldo emerson, odds and ends, a century of american literature. John Kenyon: trelawny parish, jamaica, isle of wight, samuel taylor coleridge, william wordsworth, elizabeth barrett browning, robert browning, a rhymed plea for tolerance.

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.

Ecce in Deserto
Henry Augustin Beers
65%
Compare
Champagne Rosée
John Kenyon

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1847 Publication of Agnes Grey
1848 Communist Manifesto Published
1848 Publication of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'
1848 Publication of 'Once in Royal David's City'
1848 Publication of The Biglow Papers
1848 Publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1850 Publication of 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'
1851 Publication of Moby-Dick

Henry Augustin Beers

1855 Early Education in Hartford
1869 Graduation from Yale College
1885 Publication of 'The Wayside Inn'
1889 Appointment as Professor at Yale
1899 Publication of 'A History of English Romanticism'
1910 Publication of 'The Poet's Poet'
1917 Retirement from Yale University
1926 Death of Henry Augustin Beers

John Kenyon

1795 Early Education of John Kenyon
1798 Transition to Charterhouse School
1802 Enrollment at Peterhouse, Cambridge
1808 Departure from Cambridge
1810 Financial Independence from Inheritance
1815 Literary Salon in London
1845 Support for Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1850 Publication of Kenyon's Poems

Emotional landscapes

Henry Augustin Beers: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. John Kenyon: Joy, Sensuality, Wonder.

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