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

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri
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 64% Blended 64%
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
Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri

c. May 1265 – 14 September 1321 (~56)
1 live poem · Italian

In the spring of 1265, beneath the shadow of Florence's rising towers, a child was born who would revolutionize not merely Italian literature but the entire Western imagination. Dante Alighieri entered a world of political turmoil, theological ferment, and artistic flowering, and he would spend his fifty-six years transforming personal anguish into universal art, political exile into cosmic vision, and earthly love i…

“In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little to read, there is a heading which says: Here begins a new life.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Italian Renaissance Poets, Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing

In time

John Donne
Dante Alighieri
1265 1631
Their lives did not overlap. 251 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 1,209 km separate London, England from Florence, Italy. 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

John Donne: london, catholic, anglican preacher, songs and sonnets, the flea, the sun rising, the canonization, a valediction: forbidding mourning. Dante Alighieri: florence, divine comedy, beatrice portinari, vita nuova, guido cavalcanti, black guelphs, white guelphs, de monarchia.

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 Canonization
John Donne
78% love
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Negative love
John Donne
76% love, divine
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Aire and Angels
John Donne
75% love, beauty, spiritual
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
The Undertaking
John Donne
75% love, virtue
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
The Dreame
John Donne
74% love, presence
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri
Breake of Day
John Donne
74% love
Compare
Tanto gentile, e tanto onesta pare
Dante Alighieri

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

John Donne: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Dante Alighieri: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing.

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