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

James Graham James Graham

Poet B

Sir Walter Raleigh Sir Walter Raleigh
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 68% Poems 81% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Graham

James Graham

1612 – 21 May 1650 (~38)
2 live poems · English

James Graham, first Marquess of Montrose, was born in 1612 and died on 21 May 1650. He occupies an unusual place in British literary and political history: a Scottish aristocrat whose short life contained religious revolution, civil war, spectacular military success, exile, defeat, and execution; a Royalist commander remembered as “the Great Montrose”; and a poet whose surviving verses, though few, have remained memo…

“I have been brought hither to suffer death, not for any crime I have committed, but for my loyalty to my sovereign.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Fear
Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh

c. 1554 – 29 October 1618 (~64)
2 live poems · English

Sir Walter Raleigh, born about 1554 at Hayes Barton in the parish of East Budleigh, Devon, and executed in London on 29 October 1618, remains one of the most vivid and contradictory figures of the English Renaissance. He was a soldier, imperial promoter, courtier, colonial entrepreneur, naval commander, politician, prisoner, historian, scientist, and poet. In popular memory he is often reduced to a picturesque legend…

“Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality

In time

James Graham
Sir Walter Raleigh
1554 1650
They overlapped for 7 years (1612–1618). When James Graham was born, Sir Walter Raleigh was about 58. James Graham was about 6 when Sir Walter Raleigh died.

On the map

About 677 km separate House of Dun, Angus, Scotland from Hayes Barton, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

James Graham: scottish aristocrat, covenanter, royalist commander, the great montrose, my dear and only love, wars of the three kingdoms, thirty years' war, magdalen carnegie. Sir Walter Raleigh: hayes barton, east budleigh, queen elizabeth i, humphrey gilbert, the nymph's reply to the shepherd, the passionate shepherd to his love, history of the world, lost colony.

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.

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Graham: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. Sir Walter Raleigh: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality.

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