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

Thomas Gray Thomas Gray

Poet B

Thomas Chatterton Thomas Chatterton
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 74% Poems 85% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray

26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771 (~55)
2 live poems · English

In the quiet churchyard of St. Giles' Church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, lies a simple grave that has drawn literary pilgrims for centuries. Here rests Thomas Gray (1716-1771), a man whose single greatest poem transformed him from an obscure Cambridge scholar into one of the most quoted poets in the English language. Yet Gray himself was a study in contradictions—a reluctant celebrity who shunned fame, a brillia…

“Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to which almost every one that has written has added something.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton

20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770 (~18)
5 live poems · English

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752 and died in London on 24 August 1770, not yet eighteen years old. Few English poets have left behind a life so brief, so fiercely productive, and so persistently mythologized. His name has become almost inseparable from the image of the neglected young genius: a boy of provincial poverty who invented a medieval poetic world, attempted to conquer the London lit…

“When an author resolves to think himself in the right, it is more than human argument can do to convince him he is in the wrong.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Folk & Ballad Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Thomas Gray
Thomas Chatterton
1716 1771
They overlapped for 19 years (1752–1770). When Thomas Chatterton was born, Thomas Gray was about 36. Thomas Gray was about 54 when Thomas Chatterton died.

On the map

About 178 km separate Deptford, London, England from Bristol, England. Both have ground in London.

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

horace walpole social

Thomas Gray: stoke poges, cornhill, eton college, horace walpole, richard west, elegy written in a country churchyard, ode on a distant prospect of eton college, the progress of poesy. Thomas Chatterton: bristol, st mary redcliffe, thomas rowley, william canynge, aella, the battle of hastings, the bristowe tragedie, an excelente balade of charitie.

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.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray
80% death, social, life
Compare
Suicide
Thomas Chatterton

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Gray: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Chatterton: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder.

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