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

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens

Poet B

Robert Frost Robert Frost
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 74% Poems 89% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

2 October 1879 – 2 August 1955 (~76)
8 live poems · English

Wallace Stevens stands as one of the most enigmatic and profound voices in American poetry—a philosophical poet who balanced a successful corporate career with the creation of some of the most intellectually challenging and aesthetically innovative verse of the 20th century. His poetry, characterized by its luxuriant language, philosophical depth, and preoccupation with the imagination's relationship to reality, cont…

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Robert Frost

Robert Frost

26 March 1874 – 29 January 1963 (~89)
10 live poems · English

Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…

“Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace

In time

Wallace Stevens
Robert Frost
1874 1963
They overlapped for 77 years (1879–1955). When Wallace Stevens was born, Robert Frost was about 5. Robert Frost was about 81 when Wallace Stevens died.

On the map

About 3,977 km separate Reading, Pennsylvania, USA from San Francisco, California, USA. 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

Wallace Stevens: reading, pennsylvania, harvard university, george santayana, harmonium, sunday morning, the emperor of ice-cream, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, the snow man. Robert Frost: san francisco, new england, william prescott frost, isabelle moodie frost, my butterfly: an elegy, the independent, elizabeth white, mending wall.

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.

Re-statement of Romance
Wallace Stevens
77% self
Compare
Revelation
Robert Frost
The Death of a Soldier
Wallace Stevens
77% nature
Compare
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Palace of the Babies
Wallace Stevens
76% world, light
Compare
An Old Man’s Winter Night
Robert Frost
Re-statement of Romance
Wallace Stevens
76% nature
Compare
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Invective Against Swans
Wallace Stevens
74%
Compare
A Vantage Point
Robert Frost

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wallace Stevens: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow. Robert Frost: Wonder, Longing, Peace.

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