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

Elizabeth Prentiss Elizabeth Prentiss

Poet B

Charles Whitehead Charles Whitehead
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 63% Poems 81% Blended 71%
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 feel like a ball that now is tossed to Sorrow and tossed back by Sorrow to Joy.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness
Charles Whitehead

Charles Whitehead

4 October 1804 – 5 July 1862 (~58)
2 live poems · English

Charles Whitehead was born in London on 4 October 1804, at a time when English literary culture was being reshaped by the afterglow of Romanticism, the rise of popular periodicals, and the expanding commercial possibilities of print. He was the eldest son of a prosperous wine merchant, and his childhood appears to have been materially secure. This fact makes the contrast with his final years especially stark: he died…

Neighbourhood: Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

Elizabeth Prentiss
Charles Whitehead
1804 1878
They overlapped for 45 years (1818–1862). When Elizabeth Prentiss was born, Charles Whitehead was about 14. Elizabeth Prentiss was about 44 when Charles Whitehead died.

On the map

About 5,126 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from London, England. 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

fiction

Elizabeth Prentiss: portland, maine, dorset, vermont, more love to thee, o christ, stepping heavenward, george lewis prentiss, edward payson, second congregational church, evangelical fiction. Charles Whitehead: london, melbourne hospital, the solitary, charles dickens, mary ann loomes, the autobiography of jack ketch, the cavalier, richard savage.

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
76% spiritual, soul, life
Compare
Oh! better not to live
Charles Whitehead
Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
76% spiritual
Compare
Oh! better not to live
Charles Whitehead
Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
72%
Compare
The Lamp
Charles Whitehead
Healing
Elizabeth Prentiss
71% life
Compare
The Lamp
Charles Whitehead
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
Elizabeth Prentiss
66%
Compare
The Lamp
Charles Whitehead
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
Elizabeth Prentiss
64%
Compare
Oh! better not to live
Charles Whitehead

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Prentiss: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness. Charles Whitehead: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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