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

Sir Thomas More Sir Thomas More

Poet B

Stephen Hawes Stephen Hawes
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 65% Blended 65%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More

7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535 (~57)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Renaissance literature, few figures cast as long a shadow as Sir Thomas More, a man whose pen shaped both political thought and literary imagination for centuries to come. Born into the bustling world of Tudor London in 1478, More would rise to become one of England's most celebrated humanist writers, crafting works that bridged the medieval and modern worlds while paying the ultimate price for his…

“Now would to our Lord, son Roper, upon condition that three things were well established in Christendom, I were put into a sack, and here presently cast into the Thames.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Medieval Poets, Renaissance Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Irony, Wonder
Stephen Hawes

Stephen Hawes

c. 1474 – c. 1523 (~49)
1 live poem · English

Stephen Hawes, born about 1474 and probably dead by about 1523, occupies a fascinating and sometimes awkward place in English literary history. He is neither a major medieval master on the scale of Geoffrey Chaucer nor a fully developed Renaissance poet in the manner of later Tudor writers. Yet this apparent in-betweenness is precisely what makes him important. Hawes wrote at a moment when England was emerging from t…

“For though the day be never so long, At last the bells ringeth to evensong.”

Neighbourhood: Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness

In time

Sir Thomas More
Stephen Hawes
1474 1535
They overlapped for 46 years (1478–1523). When Sir Thomas More was born, Stephen Hawes was about 4. Sir Thomas More was about 45 when Stephen Hawes died.

On the map

About 113 km separate Milk Street, Cheapside, London from Suffolk, England. Both have ground in London and 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

Sir Thomas More: tudor london, john more, utopia, archbishop john morton, canterbury college, lincoln's inn, jane colt, alice middleton. Stephen Hawes: henry vii, the pastime of pleasure, a joyfull meditation to all england, groom of the chamber, wars of the roses, courtly milieu, allegory, graunde amoure.

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.

Death
Sir Thomas More
70% power
Compare
The True Knight
Stephen Hawes
Time
Sir Thomas More
69% power
Compare
The True Knight
Stephen Hawes

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sir Thomas More: Fear, Irony, Wonder. Stephen Hawes: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness.

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