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

J.M. Synge J.M. Synge

Poet B

Edwin Arlington Robinson Edwin Arlington Robinson
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 53% Poems 83% Blended 67%
Swap sides Another related pair
J.M. Synge

J.M. Synge

16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909 (~38)
6 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures cast as long a shadow as John Millington Synge, a man who compressed into his brief thirty-seven years a literary output that would reshape the very notion of Irish dramatic art. Born on April 16, 1871, into the comfortable Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry of County Dublin, Synge would grow to become one of Ireland's most celebrated and controversial playwrights, creating…

“A play that has the same atmosphere as a poem, and yet is full of life and movement, is what I am trying to write.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow
Listen Timeline Affinities
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson

22 December 1869 – 6 April 1935 (~66)
10 live poems · English

Edwin Arlington Robinson stands as one of the most distinctive and influential voices in American poetry. Renowned for his psychologically nuanced portraits, precise craftsmanship, and unflinching explorations of the human condition, Robinson’s work bridges the 19th and 20th centuries, offering both the rigor of tradition and the insights of modernity. His journey from the small towns of Maine to the literary heights…

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

J.M. Synge
Edwin Arlington Robinson
1869 1935
They overlapped for 39 years (1871–1909). When J.M. Synge was born, Edwin Arlington Robinson was about 2. Edwin Arlington Robinson was about 40 when J.M. Synge died.
J.M. Synge in history Edwin Arlington Robinson in history Years they were given

On the map

About 4,598 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Head Tide, Maine, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

J.M. Synge

Edwin Arlington Robinson

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 death social

J.M. Synge only

irish world love dance communal festivity community revival myth mortality grief beloved

Edwin Arlington Robinson only

self dead happiness limits enduring clerks humanity philosophical ordinary shop recognition roman

From the biographies

J.M. Synge: county dublin, trinity college dublin, the aran islands, william butler yeats, hodgkin's disease, in the shadow of the glen, riders to the sea, the playboy of the western world. Edwin Arlington Robinson: head tide maine, gardiner maine, tilbury town, the torrent and the night before, the children of the night, richard cory, miniver cheevy, the man against the sky.

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.

I've thirty months
J.M. Synge
76% death
Compare
Exit
Edwin Arlington Robinson
A Question
J.M. Synge
75% death
Compare
Exit
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
75%
Compare
Horace to Leuconoë
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
75% life
Compare
Shadrach O'Leary
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
74% life
Compare
The Pilot
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Passing of the Shee
J.M. Synge
73%
Compare
The Tavern
Edwin Arlington Robinson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus

J.M. Synge

1890 J.M. Synge's Education at Trinity College
1898 First Trip to Aran Islands
1903 Publication of 'In the Shadow of the Glen'
1904 Involvement with the Abbey Theatre
1904 Publication of 'Riders to the Sea'
1905 Engagement to Molly Allgood
1907 Premiere of 'The Playboy of the Western World'
1909 Final Work: 'Deirdre of the Sorrows'

Edwin Arlington Robinson

1891 Robinson's Enrollment at Harvard University
1896 Publication of First Book, 'The Torrent and the Nightingale'
1897 Publication of 'Children of the Night'
1897 Publication of 'The Children of the Night'
1904 Publication of 'The Man Who Died'
1921 Robinson's First Pulitzer Prize
1922 Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1928 Robinson's Second Pulitzer Prize

Emotional landscapes

J.M. Synge: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow. Edwin Arlington Robinson: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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