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

Thomas Carew Thomas Carew

Poet B

Abraham Cowley Abraham Cowley
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 76% Poems 86% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Carew

Thomas Carew

1595 – 22 March 1640 (~45)
4 live poems · English

Thomas Carew, born in 1595 and buried on 22 March 1640, occupies a distinctive place in English poetry as one of the most accomplished voices of the Caroline court. He is usually grouped with the Cavalier poets, a loose modern designation for writers associated with the court of Charles I, with royalist culture, and with an ideal of elegance, loyalty, sociability, erotic wit, and cultivated pleasure. Yet Carew is mor…

“Though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethics, which, among other Precepts of Morality, forbid Self-commendation.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness
Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley

1618 – 28 July 1667 (~49)
3 live poems · English

In the tumultuous landscape of seventeenth-century English literature, few figures shine with such early brilliance yet fade with such puzzling rapidity as Abraham Cowley. Born in 1618 in London, this prodigious poet who published his first collection at fifteen, who dazzled the cavalier court and influenced an entire generation of writers, who was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer and Spenser, somehow slipp…

“Curiosity is the appetite of the mind; it must be satisfied, or the mind will starve.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Thomas Carew
Abraham Cowley
1595 1667
They overlapped for 23 years (1618–1640). When Abraham Cowley was born, Thomas Carew was about 23. Abraham Cowley was about 22 when Thomas Carew died.

On the map

About 18 km separate West Wickham, Kent, England from Fleet Street, City of London, 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

court

Thomas Carew: caroline court, cavalier poets, ben jonson, to his inconstant mistress, the spring, a rapture, sir dudley carleton, venice. Abraham Cowley: london, westminster abbey, edmund spenser, the faerie queene, westminster school, trinity college cambridge, english civil war, royalist.

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.

Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
80% love, beloved
Compare
My Picture
Abraham Cowley
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
77% love
Compare
My Picture
Abraham Cowley
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
76% love
Compare
The Heart Breaking
Abraham Cowley
To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side
Thomas Carew
73% love
Compare
My Picture
Abraham Cowley
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
72% love, heart
Compare
The Heart Breaking
Abraham Cowley
Mediocrity in Love Rejected
Thomas Carew
71% love
Compare
The Heart Breaking
Abraham Cowley

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Carew: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness. Abraham Cowley: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

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