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 Edwards Hankinson Thomas Edwards Hankinson
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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 70% Poems 83% Blended 76%
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 Edwards Hankinson

Thomas Edwards Hankinson

19 June 1805 – 6 October 1843 (~38)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Edwards Hankinson was born at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, on 19 June 1805, and died at Stainley Hall near Ripon, Yorkshire, on 6 October 1843. His short life coincided with a period of exceptional change in British religious, literary, and social history: the final decades of the Romantic movement, the Reform crisis, the growth of evangelical and missionary culture, and the opening of the Victorian age. He was neith…

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Joy

In time

Bernard Barton
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
1784 1849
They overlapped for 39 years (1805–1843). When Thomas Edwards Hankinson was born, Bernard Barton was about 21. Bernard Barton was about 59 when Thomas Edwards Hankinson died.

On the map

About 326 km separate Carlisle, Cumberland, England from St Germans, Norfolk, England. Both have ground in England.

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 Edwards Hankinson: king's lynn, norfolk, stainley hall, ripon, seatonian prize, sacred poems, david playing the harp before saul, the plague stayed.

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
80% life
Compare
Pleasures of the Visible World
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
On True Worship
Bernard Barton
79% divine, spiritual
Compare
Pleasures of the Visible World
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
76% life, world
Compare
Pleasures of the Visible World
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
69%
Compare
Mathematics
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
On Some Pictures
Bernard Barton
63%
Compare
Mathematics
Thomas Edwards Hankinson
On True Worship
Bernard Barton
58%
Compare
Mathematics
Thomas Edwards Hankinson

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 Edwards Hankinson: Longing, Tenderness, Joy.

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