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

William Johnson Cory William Johnson Cory

Poet B

Thomas Hood Thomas Hood
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 89% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Johnson Cory

William Johnson Cory

9 January 1823 – 11 June 1892 (~69)
2 live poems · English

William Johnson Cory, born William Johnson on 9 January 1823 and dead on 11 June 1892, occupies an unusual but durable place in English literary history. He was never a major public poet in the Victorian manner of Tennyson or Browning; he published relatively little, lived much of his life within the secluded world of elite education, and became known to many readers through a small collection rather than a grand car…

“At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness
Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood

23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845 (~46)
25 live poems · English

Thomas Hood was born in London on 23 May 1799 and died there on 3 May 1845, only twenty days short of his forty-sixth birthday. He occupies a distinctive, sometimes deceptively difficult place in English literary history. To generations of readers he has been the author of jokes, puns, comic ballads, and apparently effortless verbal absurdities; to others he is the compassionate author of “The Song of the Shirt” and…

“The best of friends must part.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

William Johnson Cory
Thomas Hood
1799 1892
They overlapped for 23 years (1823–1845). When William Johnson Cory was born, Thomas Hood was about 24. William Johnson Cory was about 22 when Thomas Hood died.

On the map

About 288 km separate Great Torrington, Devon, England from The Poultry, Cheapside, London. Both have ground in England and London.

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

social

William Johnson Cory: great torrington, eton college, king's college cambridge, ionica, mimnermus in church, heraclitus, the two captains, a lesson. Thomas Hood: london, the song of the shirt, the bridge of sighs, j. h. reynolds, whims and oddities, the dream of eugene aram, faithless sally brown, the plea of the midsummer fairies.

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.

If I should die to-night
William Johnson Cory
84% death, life
Compare
The Death Bed
Thomas Hood
Heraclitus
William Johnson Cory
83% death
Compare
False Poets and True
Thomas Hood
Heraclitus
William Johnson Cory
82% death
Compare
Death
Thomas Hood
If I should die to-night
William Johnson Cory
80% love
Compare
It was not in the Winter
Thomas Hood
If I should die to-night
William Johnson Cory
79% death
Compare
Death
Thomas Hood
Heraclitus
William Johnson Cory
79% death
Compare
The Death Bed
Thomas Hood

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Johnson Cory: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Thomas Hood: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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