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

E. Nesbit E. Nesbit

Poet B

Edna St. Vincent Millay Edna St. Vincent Millay
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 67% Poems 90% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit

15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924 (~66)
4 live poems · English

Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…

“All their lives they will love, and expect love—and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not get it.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay

22 February 1892 – 19 October 1950 (~58)
100 live poems · English

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and died on 19 October 1950 at her home in Austerlitz, New York. During her lifetime she became one of the most visible and commercially successful poets in the United States: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a celebrated public reader, a playwright, a lyricist, a political writer, and an emblem of the modern, sexually independent “New Woman.” Her fame…

“Life isn't one damn thing after another. It's the same damn thing again and again.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

E. Nesbit
Edna St. Vincent Millay
1858 1950
They overlapped for 33 years (1892–1924). When Edna St. Vincent Millay was born, E. Nesbit was about 34. Edna St. Vincent Millay was about 32 when E. Nesbit died.

On the map

About 5,029 km separate Kennington, Surrey, England from Rockland, Maine, USA. 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

E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire. Edna St. Vincent Millay: rockland, maine, austerlitz, new york, pulitzer prize, renascence, caroline b. dow, vassar college, greenwich village, a few figs from thistles.

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 Wife of All Ages
E. Nesbit
82% love, desire
Compare
The Philosopher
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
82% love
Compare
Alms
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
81% love
Compare
Ashes of Life
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
81% love, beloved, desire
Compare
The Philosopher
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love's Suicide
E. Nesbit
81% love
Compare
Sweet love, sweet thorn
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Wife of All Ages
E. Nesbit
81% love
Compare
Thursday
Edna St. Vincent Millay

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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