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.

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

Harold Monro Harold Monro

Poet B

Humbert Wolfe Humbert Wolfe
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 72% Poems 81% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Harold Monro

Harold Monro

14 March 1879 – 16 March 1932 (~53)
2 live poems · English

In the heart of Georgian London, amid the tumult of a literary revolution that would reshape English poetry forever, stood a slight, melancholic figure whose contribution to modern literature far exceeded his own poetic achievements. Harold Edward Monro, born on March 14, 1879, in Brussels to Scottish parents, would become the impresario of modernism, the keeper of poetry's most famous bookshop, and a poet whose work…

“I am always regretting that there are so many periodicals. I think the public is rather tired of them at present.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Humbert Wolfe

Humbert Wolfe

5 January 1885 – 5 January 1940 (~55)
3 live poems · English

On the fifth of January 1885, in the bustling commercial heart of Milan, a child was born who would become one of Britain's most popular poets of the 1920s, yet whose name today is remembered primarily for a single, sardonic epigram. Humbert Wolfe was born as Umberto Wolff in Milan, Italy, to Martin Wolff, a German Jewish merchant, and Consuela Terraccini, an Italian Jew. This dual heritage, straddling Germanic and M…

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

Harold Monro
Humbert Wolfe
1879 1940
They overlapped for 48 years (1885–1932). When Humbert Wolfe was born, Harold Monro was about 6. Humbert Wolfe was about 47 when Harold Monro died.

On the map

About 697 km separate Brussels, Belgium from Milan, Lombardy, Italy. 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

Harold Monro: brussels, georgian poetry, the poetry review, poetry bookshop, milk for the cat, children of love, strange meetings, the earth for sale. Humbert Wolfe: milan, bradford, wadham college, london sonnets, lampoons, requiem, requiem: the soldier, kensington gardens.

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.

A Word
Harold Monro
77% sound, love
Compare
Love
Humbert Wolfe
A Word
Harold Monro
76%
Compare
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
A Word
Harold Monro
75% love
Compare
Iliad
Humbert Wolfe
Milk for the Cat
Harold Monro
66%
Compare
Love
Humbert Wolfe
Milk for the Cat
Harold Monro
65%
Compare
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
Milk for the Cat
Harold Monro
60%
Compare
Iliad
Humbert Wolfe

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Harold Monro: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Humbert Wolfe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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