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.

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

James Clarence Mangan James Clarence Mangan

Poet B

Felicia Dorothea Hemans Felicia Dorothea Hemans
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 60% Poems 85% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Clarence Mangan

James Clarence Mangan

1 May 1803 – 20 June 1849 (~46)
8 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures are as tragically compelling or as artistically brilliant as James Clarence Mangan. Born into poverty and dying in destitution, Mangan lived a life that reads like one of his own melancholic verses—filled with promise, haunted by despair, and ultimately cut short by the very demons that fueled his extraordinary creativity. His brief forty-six years on earth produced so…

“To the man of genius, the day of his death proves better than the day of his birth.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Felicia Dorothea Hemans

25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835 (~42)
11 live poems · English

Felicia Dorothea Hemans, born Felicia Dorothea Browne on 25 September 1793 and dead on 16 May 1835, was among the most celebrated poets of the early nineteenth century. In her lifetime she was read with an enthusiasm now difficult to imagine: her poems circulated throughout Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the British Empire; they appeared in annuals, schoolbooks, anthologies, newspapers, and domestic parlors…

“I cannot help sometimes feeling as if it were my true task to enlarge the sphere of Sacred Poetry, and extend its influence.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow

In time

James Clarence Mangan
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
1793 1849
They overlapped for 33 years (1803–1835). When James Clarence Mangan was born, Felicia Dorothea Hemans was about 10. James Clarence Mangan was about 32 when Felicia Dorothea Hemans died.

On the map

About 222 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Liverpool, England. Both have ground in Dublin.

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

romanticism suffering

James Clarence Mangan: fishamble street, irish cultural nationalism, dark rosaleen, the nameless one, john o'donovan, eugene o'curry, the nation, romanticism. Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison.

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.

The Love-Adieu
James Clarence Mangan
80% love
Compare
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Genuine Ethereality
James Clarence Mangan
75%
Compare
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
The Love-Adieu
James Clarence Mangan
75% beauty
Compare
Bring Flowers
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Dark Rosaleen
James Clarence Mangan
74%
Compare
The Myrtle Bough
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
The Ways of Cupid
James Clarence Mangan
74% love
Compare
I Go, Sweet Friends!
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
The Love-Adieu
James Clarence Mangan
73%
Compare
The Dial of Flowers
Felicia Dorothea Hemans

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Clarence Mangan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.

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