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

Robert Nichols Robert Nichols

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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 64% Poems 82% Blended 72%
Swap sides Another related pair
Robert Nichols

Robert Nichols

6 September 1893 – 17 December 1944 (~51)
5 live poems · English

In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…

“I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with war inclines me to his opinion.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
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

Robert Nichols
Elizabeth Devereux
1893 2023
They overlapped for 11 years (1934–1944). When Elizabeth Devereux was born, Robert Nichols was about 41. Elizabeth Devereux was about 10 when Robert Nichols died.

On the map

About 10,940 km separate Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England 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.

Shared

From the biographies

Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets. 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.

Crisis
Robert Nichols
73%
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Alone
Robert Nichols
73%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
Nearer
Robert Nichols
72% body
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Crisis
Robert Nichols
72%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
Ask not how it came I died
Robert Nichols
71% life
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Alone
Robert Nichols
71%
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.

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