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

Patrick Reginald Chalmers Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Poet B

W. H. Davies W. H. Davies
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 71% Poems 91% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

27 June 1872 – 12 September 1942 (~70)
15 live poems · English

Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born on 27 June 1872 at Brechin, Angus, Scotland, and died on 12 September 1942. He belonged to that substantial but now less frequently discussed group of early twentieth-century British writers whose literary lives flourished outside the most conspicuous movements of their age. Chalmers was neither an avant-garde modernist nor a public prophet of national importance. He did not seek to…

“I think that, maybe, he might surprise us in both emergencies, for he has that outstanding quality of which the great retrievers are made—he neither gives up nor gives in.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities
W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies

3 July 1871 – 26 September 1940 (~69)
23 live poems · English

William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…

“It seems strange to say, but the dirtiest looking tramp is often the most honest and respectable, for he has not the courage to beg either food or clothes.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Patrick Reginald Chalmers
W. H. Davies
1871 1942
They overlapped for 69 years (1872–1940). When Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born, W. H. Davies was about 1. Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 68 when W. H. Davies died.
Patrick Reginald Chalmers in history W. H. Davies in history Years they were given

On the map

About 574 km separate Brechin, Angus, Scotland from Newport, Wales. Both have ground in England.

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

W. H. Davies

Open both on the History Atlas

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

world life beauty spring nature

Patrick Reginald Chalmers only

memory past faun presence wind rural winter river fish water josephine

W. H. Davies only

love social beloved birds power clouds self mother tree happiness green

From the biographies

social

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: brechin, angus, green days and blue days, a picker of pebbles, punch and judy, at the tail of the weir, the obsessive angler, rugby school. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.

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.

If Flowers Had Ghosts
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
81% spring, beauty
Compare
Days Too Short
W. H. Davies
The Lass I Love
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
79% love, heart
Compare
Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
79% world
Compare
Days Too Short
W. H. Davies
The Evening Rise
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
78% nature, world
Compare
The Kingfisher
W. H. Davies
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
78% world
Compare
When the Cuckoo Sings
W. H. Davies
In March
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
78% world, life, spring
Compare
Days Too Short
W. H. Davies

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

1885 Education at Rugby School
1891 Career in Banking Begins
1912 First Poetry Collection Published
1912 Publication of 'Green Days and Blue Days'
1917 Publication of 'A Picker of Pebbles'
1920 Publication of 'Punch and Judy'
1935 Publication of 'The Poet's Corner'
1935 Publication of 'The Wind and the Rain'

W. H. Davies

1893 Davies's Departure for America
1899 Injury and Loss of Foot
1905 Publication of 'The Soul's Destroyer'
1905 Return to England and Early Publications
1908 Publication of 'The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp'
1916 Publication of 'Nature Poems'
1930 Publication of 'Collected Poems'
1934 Publication of 'Collected Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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