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

Thomas Gray Thomas Gray

Poet B

Elizabeth Thomas Elizabeth Thomas
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% Poems 75% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray

26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771 (~55)
2 live poems · English

In the quiet churchyard of St. Giles' Church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, lies a simple grave that has drawn literary pilgrims for centuries. Here rests Thomas Gray (1716-1771), a man whose single greatest poem transformed him from an obscure Cambridge scholar into one of the most quoted poets in the English language. Yet Gray himself was a study in contradictions—a reluctant celebrity who shunned fame, a brillia…

“Now as the paradisaical pleasures of the Mahometans consist in playing upon the flute and lying with Houris, be mine to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Elizabeth Thomas

Elizabeth Thomas

1675 – 1731 (~56)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Thomas, who wrote under the name “Corinna,” was born in 1675 and died in 1731. She belongs to that large and fascinating company of early eighteenth-century women writers whose lives survive only in fragments: poems, letters, dedications, hostile anecdotes, printers’ advertisements, and the recollections of men whose literary fame later eclipsed theirs. Yet Thomas was far more than a minor satellite of Alex…

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Anger

In time

Thomas Gray
Elizabeth Thomas
1675 1771
They overlapped for 16 years (1716–1731). When Thomas Gray was born, Elizabeth Thomas was about 41. Thomas Gray was about 15 when Elizabeth Thomas died.

On the map

About 196 km separate Deptford, London, England from Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales. 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

social correspondence

Thomas Gray: stoke poges, cornhill, eton college, horace walpole, richard west, elegy written in a country churchyard, ode on a distant prospect of eton college, the progress of poesy. Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers.

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.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray
68% social
Compare
The Forsaken Wife
Elizabeth Thomas
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray
66% social
Compare
The Execration
Elizabeth Thomas

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Gray: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger.

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