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

Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poet B

Charles Mackay Charles Mackay
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 79% Poems 83% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“But Coraggio — and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Carlyles and Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight. We must do our best to be read too.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Charles Mackay

Charles Mackay

27 March 1814 – 24 December 1889 (~75)
3 live poems · English

Charles Mackay was born in Perth, Scotland, on 27 March 1814, and died in London on 24 December 1889. During a long and unusually various career, he became known as a poet, songwriter, editor, journalist, historian of London, commentator on social life, and author of one of the nineteenth century’s most durable books of cultural psychology, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was never quite…

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses one by one.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Joy, Peace

In time

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Charles Mackay
1800 1889
They overlapped for 46 years (1814–1859). When Charles Mackay was born, Thomas Babington Macaulay was about 14. Charles Mackay was about 45 when Thomas Babington Macaulay died.

On the map

About 443 km separate Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England from Perth, Scotland. 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

Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton. Charles Mackay: perth, extraordinary popular delusions, the madness of crowds, cheer boys cheer, the good time coming, morning chronicle, glasgow argus, victorian man of letters.

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.

A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
81%
Compare
Coronach, or Death-Wail
Charles Mackay
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
72%
Compare
The Miller of the Dee
Charles Mackay
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
71%
Compare
The Lark
Charles Mackay
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
69%
Compare
Coronach, or Death-Wail
Charles Mackay
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
64%
Compare
The Miller of the Dee
Charles Mackay
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
63% world
Compare
The Lark
Charles Mackay

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Charles Mackay: Longing, Joy, Peace.

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