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

Katherine Philips Katherine Philips

Poet B

William Alexander William Alexander
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% Poems 83% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Katherine Philips

Katherine Philips

1 January 1632 – 22 June 1664 (~32)
2 live poems · English

Katherine Philips, born Katherine Fowler on 1 January 1632 and dead at only thirty-two on 22 June 1664, achieved a distinction that would have seemed improbable in the unsettled England of her youth: she became a celebrated poet while she was still alive, and she did so as a woman writing in forms and subjects conventionally claimed by men. Known to her readers and friends as “Orinda,” Philips fashioned poems of frie…

“Happiness, I confess, is twofac'd, and one is Opinion; but that Opinion is certainly our own; for it were equally ridiculous and impossible to shape our Actions by others Opinions.”

Neighbourhood: LGBTQ+ Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder
William Alexander

William Alexander

c. 1567 – 12 February 1640 (~73)
2 live poems · English

William Alexander, later the first Earl of Stirling, was born about 1567 at Menstrie in Clackmannanshire, near Stirling, Scotland, and died in London on 12 February 1640. He belonged to that distinctive early Stuart class of men for whom poetry, government service, courtly advancement, religious reflection, and colonial ambition were not separate callings but overlapping forms of public life. In his own century he wa…

“Colonisers should intermarry to form such lawful alliances that by admitting equality remove contempt.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Katherine Philips
William Alexander
1567 1664
They overlapped for 9 years (1632–1640). When Katherine Philips was born, William Alexander was about 65. Katherine Philips was about 8 when William Alexander died.

On the map

About 572 km separate London, England from Menstrie, Stirling, Scotland. Both have ground in London.

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

Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. William Alexander: menstrie, clackmannanshire, first earl of stirling, james vi and i, charles i, nova scotia schemes, the tragedie of darius, aurora.

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.

Epitaph
Katherine Philips
77%
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander
Epitaph
Katherine Philips
76% death, life, mortality
Compare
A Short View of the State of Man
William Alexander
Friendship’s Mystery, To my Dearest Lucasia
Katherine Philips
74% love, world
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. William Alexander: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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