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

Edward James Mortimer Collins Edward James Mortimer Collins

Poet B

Thomas Love Peacock Thomas Love Peacock
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 74% Poems 80% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edward James Mortimer Collins

Edward James Mortimer Collins

29 June 1827 – 28 July 1876 (~49)
3 live poems · English

In the grand tapestry of Victorian literature, where titans like Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold cast long shadows across the poetic landscape, there exist quieter voices whose contributions, though perhaps less monumental, possess their own distinctive charm and significance. Edward James Mortimer Collins (29 June 1827 – 28 July 1876) was an English novelist, journalist and poet whose work embodied "light grace, thei…

“War in fact is becoming contemptible, and ought to be put down by the great nations of Europe, just as we put down a vulgar mob.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy
Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock

18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866 (~81)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Love Peacock was born on 18 October 1785 at Weymouth, Dorset, a coastal town whose mixture of fashionable society, maritime activity, and open sea offered an early imaginative setting for a writer who would remain drawn throughout his life to rivers, voyages, landscapes, and the contrast between civilized conversation and the unruly forces of nature. He was the only child of Samuel Peacock, a London glass merc…

“Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing

In time

Edward James Mortimer Collins
Thomas Love Peacock
1785 1876
They overlapped for 40 years (1827–1866). When Edward James Mortimer Collins was born, Thomas Love Peacock was about 42. Edward James Mortimer Collins was about 39 when Thomas Love Peacock died.

On the map

About 116 km separate Plymouth, Devon, England from Portland, England. Both have ground in England and Surrey.

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 fiction

Edward James Mortimer Collins: plymouth, francis collins, guernsey, berkshire, light verse, social observation, cornhill magazine, blackwood's magazine. Thomas Love Peacock: weymouth, dorset, fanny faulkner, percy bysshe shelley, headlong hall, the genius of the thames, melincourt, walcheren expedition.

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.

Coming of Age
Edward James Mortimer Collins
73%
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
73% life
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
Rain and Tears
Edward James Mortimer Collins
67%
Compare
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
Coming of Age
Edward James Mortimer Collins
67%
Compare
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
Violets at Home
Edward James Mortimer Collins
67%
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
Violets at Home
Edward James Mortimer Collins
60%
Compare
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edward James Mortimer Collins: Tenderness, Longing, Joy. Thomas Love Peacock: Spirituality, Peace, Longing.

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