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

George Henry Boker George Henry Boker

Poet B

John Drinkwater John Drinkwater
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 73% Poems 80% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
George Henry Boker

George Henry Boker

6 October 1823 – 2 January 1890 (~67)
2 live poems · English

In the glittering literary salons of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where gas lamps cast their warm glow over earnest conversations about poetry and politics, one figure stood at the intersection of art and public service with uncommon grace. George Henry Boker was born on October 6, 1823, into a world of privilege and promise that would shape his destiny as one of America's most accomplished—if underappreciated—po…

“Happy is that man whose ideal of excellence is fixed far above the heads of the vulgar. This, and this alone, saves me; for I, alas, have all the weakness of flesh.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Fear
Listen Timeline Affinities
John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater

1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937 (~55)
5 live poems · English

John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…

“Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

George Henry Boker
John Drinkwater
1823 1937
They overlapped for 9 years (1882–1890). When John Drinkwater was born, George Henry Boker was about 59. John Drinkwater was about 8 when George Henry Boker died.
George Henry Boker in history John Drinkwater in history Years they were given

On the map

About 5,704 km separate Camden, New Jersey, USA from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

George Henry Boker

John Drinkwater

Open both on the History Atlas

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

life world

George Henry Boker only

death soldier dirge dead philosophical shark ship sailor body sick

John Drinkwater only

grief apples moonlit space wonder domestic moonlight contemplative willow listening garden silence

From the biographies

drama

George Henry Boker: philadelphia, the book of the dead, the lessons of life, calaynos, francesca da rimini, bayard taylor, richard henry stoddard, union league club. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.

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.

Dirge for a Soldier
George Henry Boker
74% philosophical
Compare
The Dying Philosopher to His Fiddler
John Drinkwater
Dirge for a Soldier
George Henry Boker
74%
Compare
The Ships of Grief
John Drinkwater
Dirge for a Soldier
George Henry Boker
69%
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
The Shark
George Henry Boker
68% world
Compare
The Ships of Grief
John Drinkwater
Dirge for a Soldier
George Henry Boker
68% life
Compare
Mrs. Willow
John Drinkwater
The Shark
George Henry Boker
64% world
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'
1884 Oxford English Dictionary Begins Publication
1884 Publication of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
1885 Pasteur Successfully Tests the Rabies Vaccine

George Henry Boker

1840 Education at the University of Pennsylvania
1851 Publication of 'The Betrothed'
1861 Involvement in the Civil War
1865 Friendship with Walt Whitman
1869 Appointment as U.S. Minister to Russia
1882 Publication of 'The Book of the Dead'
1886 Publication of 'The Poet and the Critic'
1888 Death of his wife, Mary E. Boker

John Drinkwater

1908 First Published Work
1910 Marriage to Mary Drinkwater
1912 Birth of Daughter, Margaret Drinkwater
1916 Involvement in World War I
1923 Publication of 'The Collected Poems'
1930 Publication of 'The Great War and Modern Memory'
1934 Publication of 'The Last Poems'
1937 Final Years and Illness

Emotional landscapes

George Henry Boker: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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