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

Ernst Stadler Ernst Stadler

Poet B

Edward Thomas Edward Thomas
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 74% Poems 84% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Ernst Stadler

Ernst Stadler

11 August 1883 – 30 October 1914 (~31)
2 live poems · German

Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in German-language literature is out of proportion to its size. Stadler stands among the decisive early voices of Expr…

“Again an open view of the French mountains. I greet France with almost the same emotion as when I first saw Paris seven years ago. I scarcely remember there is a war. I greet you, sweet soil of France.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, German Romantics
Emotional landscape: Longing, Fear, Sensuality
Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas

3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917 (~39)
24 live poems · English

Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…

“The country is not a place to escape to, but a place to live in.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Ernst Stadler
Edward Thomas
1878 1917
They overlapped for 32 years (1883–1914). When Ernst Stadler was born, Edward Thomas was about 5. Edward Thomas was about 36 when Ernst Stadler died.

On the map

About 657 km separate Colmar, Alsace, France from Lambeth, London, 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.

Shared

From the biographies

first world war oxford landscape

Ernst Stadler: colmar, alsace, first world war, der aufbruch, expressionism, oxford, walt whitman, strasbourg. Edward Thomas: lambeth, first world war, robert frost, adlestrop, the happy-go-lucky morgans, six poems, poems, oxford.

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.

Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
80% beloved, beauty, love
Compare
The clouds that are so light
Edward Thomas
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
80% death
Compare
The Child on the Cliffs
Edward Thomas
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
78% love
Compare
These things that poets said
Edward Thomas
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
77% death, love
Compare
Rain
Edward Thomas
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
76% love
Compare
Out in the dark
Edward Thomas
Lover's Seat
Ernst Stadler
76% beauty, desire
Compare
The Unknown
Edward Thomas

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Ernst Stadler: Longing, Fear, Sensuality. Edward Thomas: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

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