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

Nathaniel Parker Willis Nathaniel Parker Willis

Poet B

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling
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 58% Blended 58%
Swap sides Another related pair
Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis

20 January 1806 – 20 January 1867 (~61)
1 live poem · English

In the grand tapestry of 19th-century American literature, certain figures shine with the steady brilliance of established stars, while others flicker with a more complex, mercurial light. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) belongs decidedly to the latter category—a writer whose life and work embodied the tensions, aspirations, and contradictions of a young nation struggling to define its cultural identity. Neither…

“I never sent you one of those homespun letters, in fact, without quite a persuasion that it will be the last. But life always seems to keep new, somehow; and a present hour always seems to me worthy any two of the past or the future.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 (~71)
17 live poems · English

Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in the bustling colonial port of Bombay, British India, a city that would forever pulse through his veins like the monsoon rains and the clamor of its streets. He died on January 18, 1936, in London, England, at the age of seventy, his body laid to rest in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey after a life that spanned the height of the British Empire…

“To their skill, sympathy, humour, and, above all, knowledge, we owe more than we realise.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Nathaniel Parker Willis
Rudyard Kipling
1806 1936
They overlapped for 3 years (1865–1867). When Rudyard Kipling was born, Nathaniel Parker Willis was about 59. Rudyard Kipling was about 2 when Nathaniel Parker Willis died.
Nathaniel Parker Willis in history Rudyard Kipling in history Years they were given

On the map

About 12,094 km separate Portland, Maine, United States from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Rudyard Kipling

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

social world

Nathaniel Parker Willis only

woman honor women beauty unseen spirits

Rudyard Kipling only

empire soldiers imperial life soldier military power self colonial tommy love duty

From the biographies

Nathaniel Parker Willis: portland, maine, fanny fern, sketches, unseen spirits, yale literary magazine, european correspondent, new york mirror, inklings of adventure. Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier.

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.

Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
75% woman, social, women
Compare
Mary, Pity Women!
Rudyard Kipling
Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
69%
Compare
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
68%
Compare
The Last of the Light Brigade
Rudyard Kipling
Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
67% world
Compare
If-
Rudyard Kipling
Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
66%
Compare
The Explanation
Rudyard Kipling
Unseen Spirits
Nathaniel Parker Willis
66% social
Compare
Tommy
Rudyard Kipling

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1865 Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
1865 Discovery of Electromagnetism
1865 Lister Introduces Antiseptic Surgery
1865 London Bazalgette Sewer System Commences Operations
1865 Publication of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'
1865 Publication of 'Essays in Criticism'
1865 Surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox
1865 Thirteenth Amendment Ratified

Nathaniel Parker Willis

1823 Education at Yale College
1828 First Major Publication: 'The Literary World'
1837 Marriage to Sarah E. H. Willis
1838 Publication of 'Pencilings'
1845 Relocation to Europe
1856 Death of His Wife, Sarah
1859 Publication of 'The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Parker Willis'
1867 Final Years and Legacy

Rudyard Kipling

1881 Kipling's First Published Work
1892 Marriage to Caroline Balestier
1894 Publication of 'The Jungle Book'
1896 Kipling's Return to England
1899 Death of Daughter Josephine
1901 Publication of 'Kim'
1907 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
1914 Kipling's Involvement in World War I

Emotional landscapes

Nathaniel Parker Willis: Despair, Sorrow, Irony. Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing.

Skip to main content