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

Ford Madox Hueffer Ford Madox Hueffer

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 70% Poems 91% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Ford Madox Hueffer

Ford Madox Hueffer

17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939 (~66)
8 live poems · English

Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…

“For myself, I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things you will be better off than if you don’t.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
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…

“I write poetry because I cannot help it.”

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

In time

Ford Madox Hueffer
Edward Thomas
1873 1939
They overlapped for 40 years (1878–1917). When Edward Thomas was born, Ford Madox Hueffer was about 5. Ford Madox Hueffer was about 44 when Edward Thomas died.

On the map

About 23 km separate Merton, Surrey, England from Lambeth, 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

Ford Madox Hueffer: merton, ford madox brown, the brown owl, the questions at the well, the fifth queen trilogy, the good soldier, joseph conrad, the english review. 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.

Autumn Evening
Ford Madox Hueffer
83% world, light
Compare
Out in the dark
Edward Thomas
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
82% light
Compare
The Dark Forest
Edward Thomas
Autumn Evening
Ford Madox Hueffer
81% light, beloved
Compare
The clouds that are so light
Edward Thomas
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
81% memory, spring
Compare
The Word
Edward Thomas
In Tenebris
Ford Madox Hueffer
81% light, darkness
Compare
Out in the dark
Edward Thomas
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
80% beauty, light
Compare
The clouds that are so light
Edward Thomas

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Ford Madox Hueffer: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Edward Thomas: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

Skip to main content