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

Elizabeth Prentiss Elizabeth Prentiss

Poet B

Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard of Bingen
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 65% Blended 65%
Swap sides Another related pair
Elizabeth Prentiss

Elizabeth Prentiss

26 October 1818 – 13 August 1878 (~60)
3 live poems · English

Elizabeth Prentiss, born Elizabeth Payson on 26 October 1818 in Portland, Maine, and dead on 13 August 1878 in Dorset, Vermont, belonged to that important company of nineteenth-century American women whose literary influence was felt most deeply in homes, churches, and private devotional reading rather than in the official institutions of literary prestige. She was a poet, hymn writer, novelist, teacher, minister’s w…

“I have an insatiable curiosity about even the outer life of those I love; and of the inner one you can not say too much.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness
Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen

c. 1098 – 17 September 1179 (~81)
1 live poem · Latin

Hildegard of Bingen, born around 1098 and dead on 17 September 1179, was among the most astonishingly various voices of the twelfth century: abbess, visionary, theological writer, poet, composer, correspondent, preacher, administrator, and observer of the natural world. To call her simply a “medieval mystic,” though true as far as it goes, is to make her smaller than she was. Her life unfolded within the institutions…

“The soul is not in the body as in a house, but as a hinge is in a door.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness

In time

Elizabeth Prentiss
Hildegard of Bingen
1098 1878
Their lives did not overlap. 639 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 5,748 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from Bermersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. 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.

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

From the biographies

religious women

Elizabeth Prentiss: portland, maine, dorset, vermont, more love to thee, o christ, stepping heavenward, george lewis prentiss, edward payson, second congregational church, evangelical fiction. Hildegard of Bingen: bermersheim, rhineland, scivias, symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, jutta of sponheim, volmar, richardis of stade, abbess.

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.

Healing
Elizabeth Prentiss
73%
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
70% divine
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
Elizabeth Prentiss
64%
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Prentiss: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness. Hildegard of Bingen: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness.

Skip to main content