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

Edmund Clarence Stedman Edmund Clarence Stedman

Poet B

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot
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 68% Poems 82% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund Clarence Stedman

8 October 1833 – 18 January 1908 (~75)
3 live poems · English

In the heart of nineteenth-century American letters stands a figure who defied easy categorization, a man who straddled two seemingly incompatible worlds with remarkable grace. Edmund Clarence Stedman, born on October 8, 1833, in Hartford, Connecticut, would become known as the "Bard of Wall Street," a sobriquet that captured both the paradox and the peculiar achievement of his life. For forty-five years, he navigate…

“Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say "this we know.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Edmund Clarence Stedman
T. S. Eliot
1833 1965
They overlapped for 21 years (1888–1908). When T. S. Eliot was born, Edmund Clarence Stedman was about 55. T. S. Eliot was about 20 when Edmund Clarence Stedman died.
Edmund Clarence Stedman in history T. S. Eliot in history Years they were given

On the map

About 1,524 km separate Hartford, Connecticut, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

T. S. Eliot

Open both on the History Atlas

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

death world life

Edmund Clarence Stedman only

beloved love surf nature waves pearls power ocean intimate bridal lover lips

T. S. Eliot only

spiritual memory urban fragmented despair modernity social consciousness history philosophical self hollow

From the biographies

Edmund Clarence Stedman: hartford, bard of wall street, elizabeth clementine stedman, new york city, the norwich tribune, how old brown took harper's ferry, pan in wall street, yale university. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.

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 Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
73% death, life
Compare
Whispers of Immortality
T. S. Eliot
The Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
72%
Compare
La Figlia Che Piange
T. S. Eliot
The Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
72% death
Compare
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
The Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
72%
Compare
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
The Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
72% death
Compare
The Wind Sprang up at Four O'clock
T. S. Eliot
The Sad Bridal
Edmund Clarence Stedman
71%
Compare
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
T. S. Eliot

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1891 Conversion to Roman Catholicism
1892 Opening of Ellis Island
1892 Valéry undergoes the Genoa crisis
1893 Co-founding of the Gaelic League
1893 Delivery of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland' Speech
1893 Publication of 'The Hound of Heaven'
1894 Death of Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Valéry begins his lifelong notebooks

Edmund Clarence Stedman

1836 Relocation to Plainfield, New Jersey
1846 Education at Norwich Academy
1853 First Published Poem
1856 Marriage to Ellen Stedman
1860 Publication of 'Poems' Collection
1895 Publication of 'The Victorian Poets'
1900 Death of His Wife, Ellen
1905 Publication of 'The Poets of America'

T. S. Eliot

1906 Eliot's Education at Harvard
1915 Publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
1917 Publication of 'Prufrock and Other Observations'
1922 Publication of 'The Waste Land'
1925 Publication of 'The Hollow Men'
1927 Conversion to Anglicanism
1933 Separation from Vivienne Haigh-Wood
1943 Publication of 'Four Quartets'

Emotional landscapes

Edmund Clarence Stedman: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

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