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

Frederic William Moorman Frederic William Moorman

Poet B

John McCrae John McCrae
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 59% Blended 59%
Swap sides Another related pair
Frederic William Moorman

Frederic William Moorman

8 September 1872 – 8 September 1919 (~47)
3 live poems · English

In the pantheon of English regional literature, few figures have managed to bridge the gap between rigorous academic scholarship and authentic folk expression as successfully as Frederic William Moorman. Born in 1872 and tragically lost to the waters of the Yorkshire Dales in 1919, Moorman's brief but remarkable career represents a unique synthesis of scholarly precision and passionate devotion to the vernacular trad…

“It should be the aim of the writer of dialect verse to bring poetry out of the coteries of the people of leisure and to make it dwell in artisans' tenements and in cottagers' kitchens.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
John McCrae

John McCrae

30 November 1872 – 28 January 1918 (~46)
1 live poem · English

John McCrae was born on 30 November 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, then a prosperous and growing town in Canada’s province of Ontario. He died on 28 January 1918 at Wimereux, France, before the war that made his name famous had ended. In the short span between those dates, he became several things at once: physician, medical teacher, pathologist, soldier, officer, friend, and poet. To later generations he is overwhelmingly…

“I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Frederic William Moorman
John McCrae
1872 1919
They overlapped for 47 years (1872–1918). They were born in the same year. Frederic William Moorman was about 46 when John McCrae died.
Frederic William Moorman in history John McCrae in history Years they were given

On the map

About 5,588 km separate Ashburton, Devon, England from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Frederic William Moorman

John McCrae

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 world

Frederic William Moorman only

industrial rural towns litany social bees feast telling mother harvest infant grief

John McCrae only

dead crosses flanders fields

From the biographies

Frederic William Moorman: yorkshire dales, university of london, university college aberystwyth, university of strasbourg, frances beatrice humpidge, a dalesman's litany, dialect literature, yorkshire dialect. John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital.

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.

Lile Doad
Frederic William Moorman
75% life, death, world
Compare
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
Telling the Bees
Frederic William Moorman
73% death, life, world
Compare
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
A Dalesman's Litany
Frederic William Moorman
71% life
Compare
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

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 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'

Frederic William Moorman

1900 Marriage to Mary Moorman
1901 Relocation to Yorkshire
1905 Publication of 'The Dialect Poems'
1910 Publication of 'The Folk-Song of the North'
1913 Publication of 'The Yorkshire Dialect'
1919 Tragic drowning in the Yorkshire Dales

John McCrae

1890 Graduation from Guelph Collegiate Institute
1898 Medical Degree from University of Toronto
1899 Service in the Second Boer War
1900 Pathology Studies at McGill University
1911 Publication of First Collection of Poetry
1914 Appointment as Medical Officer in WWI
1918 Final Days in France
1918 Illness and Hospitalization

Emotional landscapes

Frederic William Moorman: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing. John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

Skip to main content