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

Bernard Barton Bernard Barton

Poet B

Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 63% Poems 74% Blended 68%
Swap sides Another related pair
Bernard Barton

Bernard Barton

31 January 1784 – 19 February 1849 (~65)
3 live poems · English

In the quiet market town of Woodbridge, Suffolk, where the River Deben winds its way toward the North Sea, lived one of the 19th century's most prolific yet paradoxical literary figures. Bernard Barton (1784-1849) occupied a unique position in English literature—a devout Quaker who found himself torn between the commercial demands of banking and the irrepressible call of poetry. His life story reads like a gentle reb…

“I have no alternative between not writing at all, and writing what first comes into my head.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own — a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Bernard Barton
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1784 1859
They overlapped for 50 years (1800–1849). When Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, Bernard Barton was about 16. Thomas Babington Macaulay was about 49 when Bernard Barton died.

On the map

About 277 km separate Carlisle, Cumberland, England from Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

religious

Bernard Barton: woodbridge, carlisle, quaker, charles lamb, lucy jesup, metrical effusions, poems, the convict's return. Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton.

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.

On Some Pictures
Bernard Barton
70%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
70%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
66% world
Compare
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
On True Worship
Bernard Barton
65%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
On Some Pictures
Bernard Barton
61%
Compare
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
On True Worship
Bernard Barton
53%
Compare
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Bernard Barton: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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