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

Abu Nuwas Abu Nuwas

Poet B

Du Fu Du Fu
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 66% Blended 66%
Swap sides Another related pair
Abu Nuwas

Abu Nuwas

c. 756 – c. 814 (~58)
1 live poem · Arabic

Abu Nuwas, whose full name was al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami and whose life is generally dated from about 756 to about 814, occupies a singular position in the history of Arabic poetry. Few poets have been so admired for verbal brilliance, so censured for moral provocation, so repeatedly transformed into legend, and so difficult to confine within a single image. He is remembered above all as the great poet of wine, urb…

“Refrain from blaming me, for blame is a provocation, and cure me with the very thing that caused the disease.”

Neighbourhood: Ancient & Classical Poets, Arabic Poets, Classical & Ancient Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Joy, Longing
Du Fu

Du Fu

712 – 770 (~58)
1 live poem · Mandarin Chinese

Du Fu, born in 712 and dead by the end of 770, stands among the most deeply admired poets in the Chinese language and among the great literary witnesses of world history. He lived through the glittering late flowering and violent fracture of the Tang dynasty, an age remembered for imperial splendor, cosmopolitan confidence, artistic achievement, civil war, famine, displacement, and political decline. His poems preser…

Neighbourhood: Ancient & Classical Poets, Chinese Poets, Classical & Ancient Poets, Classical Chinese Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

Abu Nuwas
Du Fu
712 814
They overlapped for 15 years (756–770). When Abu Nuwas was born, Du Fu was about 44. Abu Nuwas was about 14 when Du Fu died.

On the map

About 5,990 km separate Ahvaz, Iran from Gong County, Henan, China. 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.

Shared

From the biographies

history

Abu Nuwas: ahvaz, basra, baghdad, harun al-rashid, muhammad al-amin, waliba ibn al-hubab, khamriyyat, ghazal. Du Fu: tang dynasty, chang'an, luoyang, li bai, an lushan rebellion, moonlit night, the ballad of the army carts, the song of the beautiful ladies.

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.

Let Us Drink!
Abu Nuwas
62% power, world
Compare
Chun Wang
Du Fu

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Abu Nuwas: Sensuality, Joy, Longing. Du Fu: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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