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

Max Ehrmann Max Ehrmann

Poet B

Thomas MacDonagh Thomas MacDonagh
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 57% Poems 80% Blended 67%
Swap sides Another related pair
Max Ehrmann

Max Ehrmann

26 September 1872 – 9 September 1945 (~73)
2 live poems · English

Max Ehrmann was born on 26 September 1872 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died there on 9 September 1945, seventeen days before his seventy-third birthday. He is remembered almost everywhere as the author of “Desiderata,” the compact prose poem beginning, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” but that single work represents only the most widely circulated part of a long, earnest, and sometimes overlooked literary life…

“I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book—my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me—and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition upon modesty.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace
Thomas MacDonagh

Thomas MacDonagh

1 February 1878 – 3 May 1916 (~38)
3 live poems · English

In the annals of Irish history, few figures embody the complex intersection of literature and revolution as completely as Thomas Stanislaus MacDonagh. Born on February 1, 1878, in the small Tipperary town of Cloughjordan, and executed by firing squad on May 3, 1916, at the age of thirty-eight, MacDonagh's brief life encompassed an extraordinary range of achievements. He was a teacher who co-founded Ireland's first te…

“The poet is the interpreter of the world to men, and the interpreter of men to the world.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Max Ehrmann
Thomas MacDonagh
1872 1945
They overlapped for 39 years (1878–1916). When Thomas MacDonagh was born, Max Ehrmann was about 6. Max Ehrmann was about 44 when Thomas MacDonagh died.

On the map

About 5,964 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Cloughjordan, Tipperary, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius. Thomas MacDonagh: cloughjordan, tipperary, easter rising, through the ivory gate, april and may, the golden joy, gaelic league, joseph plunkett.

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.

I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
74% love, social
Compare
John-John
Thomas MacDonagh
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
72%
Compare
Death
Thomas MacDonagh
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
70% self
Compare
The Yellow Bittern
Thomas MacDonagh
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
68% life
Compare
Death
Thomas MacDonagh
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
64% life
Compare
The Yellow Bittern
Thomas MacDonagh
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
63% life
Compare
John-John
Thomas MacDonagh

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace. Thomas MacDonagh: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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