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

Yone Noguchi Yone Noguchi
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 58% Poems 82% Blended 69%
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…

“Education is largely the acquisition of the accumulated prejudices of man’s past—often a serious handicap for the influencing of man’s future.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities
Yone Noguchi

Yone Noguchi

8 December 1875 – 13 July 1947 (~72)
4 live poems · English

In the annals of literary history, few figures occupy as singular a position as Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who dared to write primarily in English during an era when such a choice seemed almost inconceivable. Born Yonejiro Noguchi on December 8, 1875, in the coastal town of Tsushima near Nagoya, Japan, he would become a pioneering voice in cross-cultural literature, a man who walked between East and West with rema…

“They were the singers of life and joy, not of death and tears.”

Neighbourhood: Imagist Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Max Ehrmann
Yone Noguchi
1872 1947
They overlapped for 71 years (1875–1945). When Yone Noguchi was born, Max Ehrmann was about 3. Yone Noguchi was about 70 when Max Ehrmann died.
Max Ehrmann in history Yone Noguchi in history Years they were given

On the map

About 10,560 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Tsushima, Aichi, Japan. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Max Ehrmann

Yone Noguchi

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

life nature world love self

Max Ehrmann only

desiderata existence wisdom advice peace social afraid

Yone Noguchi only

clouds beauty voice songs apparition absence beloved presence stars desire summer

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. Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage.

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.

Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
76% nature
Compare
I and Nature are one in sweet weariness
Yone Noguchi
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
73% love
Compare
Apparition
Yone Noguchi
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
70% life
Compare
Is there anything new under the sun
Yone Noguchi
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
69%
Compare
Apparition
Yone Noguchi
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
69% world
Compare
I and Nature are one in sweet weariness
Yone Noguchi
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
68% world
Compare
Is there anything new under the sun
Yone Noguchi

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'

Max Ehrmann

1894 Graduation from DePauw University
1896 Admission to the Indiana Bar
1903 Marriage to Sara D. McCulloch
1927 Publication of 'Desiderata'
1931 Relocation to California
1935 Friendship with poet James Whitcomb Riley
1940 Publication of 'The Book of Life'
1960 Posthumous recognition of 'Desiderata'

Yone Noguchi

1892 Education at Keio University
1893 Immigration to the United States
1908 Friendship with Ezra Pound
1910 Publication of 'The Pilgrimage'
1912 Return to Japan
1915 Publication of 'The American Diary'
1916 Friendship with Rabindranath Tagore
1921 Publication of 'The Spirit of Japan'

Emotional landscapes

Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace. Yone Noguchi: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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