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

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Poet B

Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti
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 88% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

14 September 1883 – 22 April 1922 (~39)
2 live poems · English

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was born on 14 September 1883 at Gunnersbury, then in Middlesex, England, and died on 22 April 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During her lifetime she was among the best-known and most admired poets in Canada, a writer whose delicately fashioned lyrics, religious imagination, and exact attention to the natural world won readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her posthumous reput…

“Don't keep reminding me I'm a poet. I very seldom feel equal to living up to my own Immortal Verse.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities
Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894 (~64)
68 live poems · English

To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…

“They are very superior to my preconceived notions of them, and indicate talent and feeling: if such poetry may be trusted for telling a true tale.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
Christina Rossetti
1830 1922
They overlapped for 12 years (1883–1894). When Marjorie L. C. Pickthall was born, Christina Rossetti was about 53. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall was about 11 when Christina Rossetti died.
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall in history Christina Rossetti in history Years they were given

On the map

About 10 km separate Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England from 38 Charlotte Street, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Christina Rossetti

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 loss love world beauty

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall only

sorrow green innocence nuts falling leaves butterflies witch tower birds swan

Christina Rossetti only

death spiritual nature divine rose flowers self spring grief dead memory

From the biographies

religious woman

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: gunnersbury, vancouver, two ears of corn, the drift of pinions, charles g. d. roberts, canadian poets, victorian aestheticism, catholic church. Christina Rossetti: pre-raphaelite brotherhood, goblin market, the girlhood of mary virgin, dante gabriel rossetti, james collinson, charles bagot cayley, anglo-catholic, sing-song: a nursery rhyme book.

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 Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
85% life, leaves
Compare
O roses for the flush of youth
Christina Rossetti
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
82%
Compare
A Daughter of Eve
Christina Rossetti
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
82%
Compare
Mirage
Christina Rossetti
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
81%
Compare
Bird or Beast
Christina Rossetti
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
80% loss, life
Compare
Gone Forever
Christina Rossetti
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
80% life, love
Compare
Three Seasons
Christina Rossetti

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1883 Emil Christian Hansen Isolates a Pure Yeast Culture at Carlsberg
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'
1884 Oxford English Dictionary Begins Publication
1884 Publication of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
1885 Pasteur Successfully Tests the Rabies Vaccine
1885 Premiere of 'The Mikado'
1886 Discovery of Gold on the Witwatersrand Sparks Johannesburg Boom

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

1889 Family Relocation to Canada
1898 First Publication of Children's Stories
1904 Publication of 'Two Ears of Corn'
1910 Publication of 'The Silver Maple'
1911 Move to British Columbia
1913 Publication of 'The Wishing Tree'
1917 Publication of 'The House of All Sorts'
1919 Recognition by the Canadian Authors Association

Christina Rossetti

1847 Christina Rossetti's First Published Poems
1850 Christina Rossetti's Engagement to James Collinson
1854 Christina Rossetti's Religious Conversion
1854 Death of Gabriele Rossetti
1859 Christina Rossetti Begins Volunteer Work at Highgate Penitentiary
1866 Christina Rossetti Publishes 'The Prince's Progress and Other Poems'
1881 Christina Rossetti Publishes 'A Pageant and Other Poems'
1892 Christina Rossetti Undergoes Surgery for Breast Cancer

Emotional landscapes

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder. Christina Rossetti: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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