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

Rose Milligan Rose Milligan

Poet B

Elizabeth Devereux Elizabeth Devereux
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% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Rose Milligan

Rose Milligan

1938 – 2024 (~86)
1 live poem · English

Born in the rugged landscapes of Yorkshire in 1938, Rose Milligan entered a world still echoing with the resilience forged by the interwar years and the looming shadows of global conflict. Yorkshire, with its rolling moors, industrial grit, and timeless valleys, would imprint itself deeply upon her sensibility, nurturing a quiet appreciation for the natural world that later blossomed into poetic reflection. Though de…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness
Elizabeth Devereux

Elizabeth Devereux

12 March 1934 – 29 July 2023 (~89)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace

In time

Rose Milligan
Elizabeth Devereux
1934 2024
They overlapped for 86 years (1938–2023). When Rose Milligan was born, Elizabeth Devereux was about 4. Rose Milligan was about 85 when Elizabeth Devereux died.

On the map

About 10,896 km separate United Kingdom from Singapore. 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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

From the biographies

loss

Rose Milligan: north lancashire, lake district, dust if you must, the lady magazine, great-great-grandchildren, stage 3 uterine cancer, his heart ministry, the glory gathering. Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.

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.

Dust if You Must
Rose Milligan
71%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
Dust if You Must
Rose Milligan
69%
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Rose Milligan: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.

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