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

John Donne John Donne

Poet B

Martin Peerson Martin Peerson
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% Blended 66%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Donne

John Donne

1572 – 31 March 1631 (~59)
40 live poems · English

John Donne was born in London in 1572, probably in January, though the exact day remains uncertain, and he died in London on 31 March 1631. Few English writers have seemed so divided within themselves, or have turned division into such memorable art. He was at once a Catholic child in a Protestant state, an ambitious courtier whose prospects were ruined by love, a husband burdened by debt and bereavement, a poet of e…

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Martin Peerson

Martin Peerson

c. 1571 – 16 January 1651 (~80)
1 live poem · English

In the twilight years of Elizabeth I's reign and throughout the tumultuous early decades of the seventeenth century, when England stood at the crossroads between medieval traditions and modern innovations, one composer quietly crafted some of the most exquisite musical settings of poetry ever written. Martin Peerson, born around 1571 and dying in 1651, lived through one of the most extraordinary periods in English cu…

Neighbourhood: Elizabethan Poets, Lute-Song Composers
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair

In time

John Donne
Martin Peerson
1571 1651
They overlapped for 60 years (1572–1631). When John Donne was born, Martin Peerson was about 1. Martin Peerson was about 60 when John Donne died.

On the map

About 117 km separate London, England from March, Cambridgeshire, England. Both have ground in London.

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

church

John Donne: london, catholic, anglican preacher, songs and sonnets, the flea, the sun rising, the canonization, a valediction: forbidding mourning. Martin Peerson: march, cambridgeshire, st. paul's cathedral, william byrd, thomas tallis, christopher marlowe, william shakespeare, mottects or grave chamber musique.

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 Blossome
John Donne
79% love
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson
Love's Growth
John Donne
78% love, spring
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson
Love's Usury
John Donne
77% love
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson
The Computation
John Donne
77% love
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson
The Paradox
John Donne
77% love
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson
Negative love
John Donne
76% love
Compare
The spring of joy is dry
Martin Peerson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Donne: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Martin Peerson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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