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

Katharine Lee Bates Katharine Lee Bates

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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 54% Poems 78% Blended 65%
Swap sides Another related pair
Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates

12 August 1859 – 28 March 1929 (~70)
3 live poems · English

Katharine Lee Bates was born on 12 August 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and died on 28 March 1929 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her name is permanently associated with “America the Beautiful,” one of the most familiar and resonant poems in United States culture. Yet the anthem has sometimes obscured the range of the woman who wrote it. Bates was not simply a patriotic versifier who happened to find a m…

“It is beautiful to see out of what scant allowance of that which we call well-being, may be evolved wisdom and joy, poetry and religion.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
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…

“A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”

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

In time

Katharine Lee Bates
Thomas Love Peacock
1785 1929
They overlapped for 8 years (1859–1866). When Katharine Lee Bates was born, Thomas Love Peacock was about 74. Katharine Lee Bates was about 7 when Thomas Love Peacock died.

On the map

About 5,164 km separate Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA from Portland, England. 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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

From the biographies

Katharine Lee Bates: falmouth, wellesley, america the beautiful, wellesley college, william bates, cornelia frances lee bates, katharine coman, the scarab. 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.

The Fellowship
Katharine Lee Bates
74%
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
Firewood
Katharine Lee Bates
73% grief
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
The Fellowship
Katharine Lee Bates
64%
Compare
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
America the Beautiful
Katharine Lee Bates
64%
Compare
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
Firewood
Katharine Lee Bates
61%
Compare
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
America the Beautiful
Katharine Lee Bates
57%
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

Katharine Lee Bates: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Thomas Love Peacock: Spirituality, Peace, Longing.

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