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

Bret Harte Bret Harte

Poet B

Ebenezer Jones Ebenezer Jones
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 61% Poems 80% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Bret Harte

Bret Harte

25 August 1836 – 5 May 1902 (~66)
3 live poems · English

Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…

“Everywhere the body is worshipped. Beside them we are but unsubstantial spirits.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Irony
Ebenezer Jones

Ebenezer Jones

20 January 1820 – 14 September 1860 (~40)
2 live poems · English

Ebenezer Jones was born in Islington, then a northern suburb of London, on 20 January 1820, and died in London on 14 September 1860, only forty years old. During his lifetime he was almost wholly unknown as a poet, and for decades after his death his name survived chiefly as a curiosity in bibliographies and among a small number of readers with a taste for neglected Victorian oddities. Yet his reputation gradually al…

Neighbourhood: Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Bret Harte
Ebenezer Jones
1820 1902
They overlapped for 25 years (1836–1860). When Bret Harte was born, Ebenezer Jones was about 16. Bret Harte was about 24 when Ebenezer Jones died.

On the map

About 5,421 km separate Albany, New York, USA from Islington, London, England. 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

social

Bret Harte: albany, new york, camberley, surrey, gold rush, overland monthly, the luck of roaring camp, the outcasts of poker flat, anna griswold, samuel clemens. Ebenezer Jones: islington, studies of sensation and event, victorian poetry, percy bysshe shelley, john keats, robert browning, chartism, commercial realities.

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.

Twenty Years
Bret Harte
73% world
Compare
To live in vain! to live in pain
Ebenezer Jones
Coyote
Bret Harte
72% social
Compare
The Vicarage
Ebenezer Jones
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
67%
Compare
The Vicarage
Ebenezer Jones
Coyote
Bret Harte
65%
Compare
To live in vain! to live in pain
Ebenezer Jones

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony. Ebenezer Jones: Irony, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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