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

Hilda Doolittle Hilda Doolittle

Poet B

Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard of Bingen
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 69% Blended 69%
Swap sides Another related pair
Hilda Doolittle

Hilda Doolittle

10 September 1886 – 27 September 1961 (~75)
6 live poems · English

Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…

“Sappho has become for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for poignant human feeling.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing
Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen

c. 1098 – 17 September 1179 (~81)
1 live poem · Latin

Hildegard of Bingen, born around 1098 and dead on 17 September 1179, was among the most astonishingly various voices of the twelfth century: abbess, visionary, theological writer, poet, composer, correspondent, preacher, administrator, and observer of the natural world. To call her simply a “medieval mystic,” though true as far as it goes, is to make her smaller than she was. Her life unfolded within the institutions…

“The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured, it must not be destroyed.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness

In time

Hilda Doolittle
Hildegard of Bingen
1098 1961
Their lives did not overlap. 707 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 6,289 km separate Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA from Bermersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. 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

female authority women

Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college. Hildegard of Bingen: bermersheim, rhineland, scivias, symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, jutta of sponheim, volmar, richardis of stade, abbess.

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.

Loss
Hilda Doolittle
66%
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Oread
Hilda Doolittle
65% nature
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Orchard
Hilda Doolittle
63%
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
The Helmsman
Hilda Doolittle
61% power
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Garden
Hilda Doolittle
59%
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen
Storm
Hilda Doolittle
59% nature, power
Compare
O vis eternitatis
Hildegard of Bingen

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing. Hildegard of Bingen: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness.

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