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

Arthur Hugh Clough Arthur Hugh Clough

Poet B

Arthur O'Shaughnessy Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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 79% Poems 89% Blended 84%
Swap sides Another related pair
Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough

1 January 1819 – 13 November 1861 (~42)
12 live poems · English

Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…

“And simple enjoyments are, if not the most voluptuous and delicately refined, assuredly the manliest and healthiest, the most honest and rational and permanent.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

14 March 1844 – 30 January 1881 (~37)
20 live poems · English

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…

“But with Victor Hugo I do not say, ‘Art for Art’, but ‘Art for humanity’.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1819 1881
They overlapped for 18 years (1844–1861). When Arthur O'Shaughnessy was born, Arthur Hugh Clough was about 25. Arthur O'Shaughnessy was about 17 when Arthur Hugh Clough died.

On the map

About 274 km separate Liverpool, England from Ealing, London, England. Both have ground in England.

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

social

Arthur Hugh Clough: liverpool, florence, charleston, thomas arnold, matthew arnold, oxford movement, amours de voyage, the bothie of tober-na-vuolich. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.

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.

Qua Cursum Ventus
Arthur Hugh Clough
81% hope
Compare
Barcarolle
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Questioning Spirit
Arthur Hugh Clough
80%
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Shall I decide it by a random shot?
Arthur Hugh Clough
80% self, life
Compare
Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Shall I decide it by a random shot?
Arthur Hugh Clough
80%
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Questioning Spirit
Arthur Hugh Clough
79% life
Compare
Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Arthur Hugh Clough
79%
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Arthur Hugh Clough: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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