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

C. P. Cavafy C. P. Cavafy
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 63% Blended 63%
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
C. P. Cavafy

C. P. Cavafy

29 April 1863 – 29 April 1933 (~70)
1 live poem · Greek

Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…

“I am not a poet. I am a historian.”

Neighbourhood: Greek Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Max Ehrmann
C. P. Cavafy
1863 1945
They overlapped for 62 years (1872–1933). When Max Ehrmann was born, C. P. Cavafy was about 9. Max Ehrmann was about 61 when C. P. Cavafy died.
Max Ehrmann in history C. P. Cavafy in history Years they were given

On the map

About 9,840 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Alexandria, Egypt. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Max Ehrmann

C. P. Cavafy

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

world self

Max Ehrmann only

life desiderata existence wisdom advice nature peace love social afraid

C. P. Cavafy only

walls cavafy barriers confinement isolation identity wall

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. C. P. Cavafy: alexandria, greek diaspora, anglo-egyptian war, peter john cavafy, haricleia georgaki cavafy, the god abandons antony, waiting for the barbarians, che fece... il gran rifiuto.

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
66% world, self
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
58%
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
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 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'

C. P. Cavafy

1877 Return to Alexandria
1896 Cavafy's First Published Poem
1904 Cavafy's First Collection Published
1908 Cavafy's Appointment as a Civil Servant
1911 Cavafy's Major Work 'Ithaka' Published
1932 Cavafy's Final Major Work Published
1933 Cavafy's Death and Legacy

Emotional landscapes

Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace. C. P. Cavafy: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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