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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Poet B

John Drinkwater John Drinkwater
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 85% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

11 November 1836 – 19 March 1907 (~71)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still finding its literary voice and dying in an America confidently asserting its cultural sophistication, A…

“The personal magnetism of an author does not extend far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Peace
John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater

1 June 1882 – 25 March 1937 (~55)
5 live poems · English

John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…

“We find, in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure freeing itself in the best words in the best order.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair

In time

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
John Drinkwater
1836 1937
They overlapped for 26 years (1882–1907). When John Drinkwater was born, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was about 46. John Drinkwater was about 25 when Thomas Bailey Aldrich died.

On the map

About 5,204 km separate Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich: portsmouth, new hampshire, new orleans, lilian woodman, the bells: a collection of chimes, the ballad of babie bell, shiloh: a requiem, the story of a bad boy, james russell lowell. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.

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.

Memory
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
75%
Compare
Moonlit Apples
John Drinkwater
A Touch of Nature
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
75% world
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
Memory
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
74%
Compare
Harvesting
John Drinkwater
Memory
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
74%
Compare
The Dying Philosopher to His Fiddler
John Drinkwater
Memory
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
74%
Compare
Mrs. Willow
John Drinkwater
A Touch of Nature
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
73% life
Compare
Moonlit Apples
John Drinkwater

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Longing, Wonder, Peace. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

Skip to main content