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.

I want a simpler life, without the hassle of being online. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the life I want.

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.

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

Charles Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire

Poet B

Paul Verlaine Paul Verlaine
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 84% Poems 86% Blended 85%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867 (~46)
4 live poems · French

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…

“Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896 (~52)
2 live poems · French

Paul Verlaine was born Paul-Marie Verlaine on 30 March 1844 in Metz, then a French garrison city in Lorraine, and died in Paris on 8 January 1896. Few poets have made a more decisive contribution to the sound, atmosphere, and inward freedom of modern French verse, and few have lived so visibly within the contradictions that their work explores. Verlaine could write with extraordinary delicacy about rain, moonlight, p…

“I am quite discouraged, quite sad at times. Would you believe that one of my sorrows is still my wife!”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Tenderness, Wonder

In time

Charles Baudelaire
Paul Verlaine
1821 1896
They overlapped for 24 years (1844–1867). When Paul Verlaine was born, Charles Baudelaire was about 23. Paul Verlaine was about 23 when Charles Baudelaire died.

On the map

About 283 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Metz, Grand Est, France. Both have ground in Paris and Île-de-France.

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

paris french

Charles Baudelaire: paris, les fleurs du mal, jeanne duval, decadence, prose poetry, eugène delacroix, lycée louis-le-grand, mauritius. Paul Verlaine: metz, paris, mathilde mauté de fleurville, arthur rimbaud, poèmes saturniens, fêtes galantes, clair de lune, romances sans paroles.

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.

Les Métamorphoses du vampire
Charles Baudelaire
78% desire
Compare
Pensionnaires
Paul Verlaine
Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
77%
Compare
Clair De Lune
Paul Verlaine
Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
77%
Compare
Pensionnaires
Paul Verlaine
Spleen
Charles Baudelaire
75%
Compare
Clair De Lune
Paul Verlaine
Les Métamorphoses du vampire
Charles Baudelaire
74% beauty
Compare
Clair De Lune
Paul Verlaine
Spleen
Charles Baudelaire
73%
Compare
Pensionnaires
Paul Verlaine

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Baudelaire: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Paul Verlaine: Sensuality, Tenderness, Wonder.

Skip to main content