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

Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet
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 76% Poems 85% Blended 80%
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…

“Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those travelling this dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness
Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet

1612 – 16 September 1672 (~60)
5 live poems · English

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northampton, England, into a family unusually well positioned to cultivate both religious seriousness and intellectual ambition. Her precise birth date is uncertain, though she was baptized on March 20, 1612. She entered the world during the reign of James I, in an England defined by political conflict, religious controversy, expanding trade, and the vigorous literary a…

“There's no object that we see but carries a double reflection, one of its own, and one of the beholder's.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Colonial American Poets, Devotional Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

Elizabeth Prentiss
Anne Bradstreet
1612 1878
Their lives did not overlap. 146 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 4,982 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from Northumbria, England. Shared ground: United States.

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

religious domestic 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. Anne Bradstreet: northampton, puritan, the tenth muse, simon bradstreet, the prologue, john winthrop, emmanuel college, the four monarchies.

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.

Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
82% spiritual, divine, devotional
Compare
What God is like to him I serve
Anne Bradstreet
Healing
Elizabeth Prentiss
80% spiritual, life
Compare
What God is like to him I serve
Anne Bradstreet
Healing
Elizabeth Prentiss
80% spiritual, life
Compare
In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence
Anne Bradstreet
Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
80% spiritual, divine, faith
Compare
In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence
Anne Bradstreet
Not Poor
Elizabeth Prentiss
77% divine, faith
Compare
Upon my Son Samuel his goeing for England
Anne Bradstreet
Healing
Elizabeth Prentiss
74% life
Compare
Upon my Son Samuel his goeing for England
Anne Bradstreet

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Prentiss: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness. Anne Bradstreet: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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