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

Frederic William Moorman Frederic William Moorman

Poet B

John Drinkwater John Drinkwater
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 67% Poems 85% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Frederic William Moorman

Frederic William Moorman

8 September 1872 – 8 September 1919 (~47)
3 live poems · English

In the pantheon of English regional literature, few figures have managed to bridge the gap between rigorous academic scholarship and authentic folk expression as successfully as Frederic William Moorman. Born in 1872 and tragically lost to the waters of the Yorkshire Dales in 1919, Moorman's brief but remarkable career represents a unique synthesis of scholarly precision and passionate devotion to the vernacular trad…

“It is hardly necessary to state that Yorkshire has produced neither a Robert Burns, a William Barnes, nor even an Edwin Waugh.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater

1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937 (~55)
5 live poems · English

John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…

“And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the same thing.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Frederic William Moorman
John Drinkwater
1872 1937
They overlapped for 38 years (1882–1919). When John Drinkwater was born, Frederic William Moorman was about 10. John Drinkwater was about 37 when Frederic William Moorman died.
Frederic William Moorman in history John Drinkwater in history Years they were given

On the map

About 287 km separate Ashburton, Devon, England from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Both have ground in England.

Frederic William Moorman

John Drinkwater

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 world grief

Frederic William Moorman only

death industrial rural towns litany social bees feast telling mother harvest infant

John Drinkwater only

apples moonlit space wonder domestic moonlight contemplative willow listening garden silence wall

From the biographies

Frederic William Moorman: yorkshire dales, university of london, university college aberystwyth, university of strasbourg, frances beatrice humpidge, a dalesman's litany, dialect literature, yorkshire dialect. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.

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.

Lile Doad
Frederic William Moorman
75% harvest, world
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
Lile Doad
Frederic William Moorman
74% world, grief
Compare
The Ships of Grief
John Drinkwater
Telling the Bees
Frederic William Moorman
73% world
Compare
The Ships of Grief
John Drinkwater
Telling the Bees
Frederic William Moorman
73% life, world
Compare
Mrs. Willow
John Drinkwater
Lile Doad
Frederic William Moorman
72% life, world, grief
Compare
Mrs. Willow
John Drinkwater
Telling the Bees
Frederic William Moorman
72% world
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'
1884 Oxford English Dictionary Begins Publication
1884 Publication of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
1885 Pasteur Successfully Tests the Rabies Vaccine

Frederic William Moorman

1900 Marriage to Mary Moorman
1901 Relocation to Yorkshire
1905 Publication of 'The Dialect Poems'
1910 Publication of 'The Folk-Song of the North'
1913 Publication of 'The Yorkshire Dialect'
1919 Tragic drowning in the Yorkshire Dales

John Drinkwater

1908 First Published Work
1910 Marriage to Mary Drinkwater
1912 Birth of Daughter, Margaret Drinkwater
1916 Involvement in World War I
1923 Publication of 'The Collected Poems'
1930 Publication of 'The Great War and Modern Memory'
1934 Publication of 'The Last Poems'
1937 Final Years and Illness

Emotional landscapes

Frederic William Moorman: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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