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

E. Nesbit E. Nesbit

Poet B

Nora Hopper Chesson Nora Hopper Chesson
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 72% Poems 92% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit

15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924 (~66)
4 live poems · English

Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…

“All their lives they will love, and expect love—and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not get it.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Nora Hopper Chesson

Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 – 14 April 1906 (~35)
79 live poems · English

Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…

“The custom of leaving the house-doors wide open just as the clock strikes midnight.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

E. Nesbit
Nora Hopper Chesson
1858 1924
They overlapped for 36 years (1871–1906). When Nora Hopper Chesson was born, E. Nesbit was about 13. E. Nesbit was about 48 when Nora Hopper Chesson died.

On the map

About 250 km separate Kennington, Surrey, England from Exeter, Devon, England. 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

From the biographies

E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.

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.

Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
84% beloved
Compare
A Connaught Lament
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
84% love, beloved
Compare
Gypsy Song
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
84% love
Compare
If I Had Been a Rose
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
83% love
Compare
Rosemary for Remembrance
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
82% beloved
Compare
Castara's Flitting
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
81% love, beloved
Compare
One Way of Love
Nora Hopper Chesson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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