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

A. A. Milne A. A. Milne

Poet B

Strickland Gillilan Strickland Gillilan
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 66% Poems 83% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956 (~74)
67 live poems · English

Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London, on 18 January 1882, into a household where education, discipline, and intellectual curiosity were daily realities. He was the youngest of three sons of John Vine Milne and Sarah Marie Heginbotham Milne. His father was the headmaster of Henley House School, a small independent school in Kilburn, and the school stood at the center of family life. The young Alan was educ…

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness
Strickland Gillilan

Strickland Gillilan

21 September 1869 – 25 April 1954 (~85)
2 live poems · English

Strickland Gillilan was born on 21 September 1869 in Jackson County, Ohio, a region whose rural rhythms, small-town sociability, and vigorous political culture supplied much of the material from which he would make a career. He died on 25 April 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, after a long life spent as a journalist, lecturer, humorist, versifier, and public entertainer. In the literary histories that privilege modernism…

“Evidently you are under the impression that I do this work for the fun I get out of hearing me.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Children's Verse, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony

In time

A. A. Milne
Strickland Gillilan
1869 1956
They overlapped for 73 years (1882–1954). When A. A. Milne was born, Strickland Gillilan was about 13. A. A. Milne was about 72 when Strickland Gillilan died.

On the map

About 6,246 km separate Hampstead, London, England from Jackson County, Ohio, USA. 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

social

A. A. Milne: kilburn, henley house school, h. g. wells, trinity college, granta, punch, winnie-the-pooh, christopher robin. Strickland Gillilan: jackson county, baltimore, the reading mother, including finnigin, sunshine and awkwardness, humorist, newspaper-minded poet, public entertainer.

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.

The Charcoal Burner
A. A. Milne
75%
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan
At Home
A. A. Milne
75%
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan
The Alchemist
A. A. Milne
75%
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan
Before Tea
A. A. Milne
75%
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan
Sand-Between-the-Toes
A. A. Milne
74%
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan
Halfway Down
A. A. Milne
73% life
Compare
The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

A. A. Milne: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness. Strickland Gillilan: Joy, Wonder, Irony.

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