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

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Poet B

Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
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 69% Poems 87% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

17 August 1840 – 10 September 1922 (~82)
9 live poems · English

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, born on 17 August 1840 at Petworth in Sussex and dead on 10 September 1922 at Newbuildings Place, his Sussex home, lived a life unusually crowded with contradiction. He was an English gentleman who became one of Victorian Britain’s most persistent critics of empire; a formal, often old-fashioned poet who sought to make verse answer political injustice; a diplomat who abandoned official service i…

“But the march of 'Progress' is irresistible in the end; and every year the old-fashioned idea of the rights of uncivilised man dies more completely out.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

8 November 1831 – 24 November 1891 (~60)
4 live poems · English

The Victorian era produced many remarkable figures who straddled the worlds of literature and public service, but few navigated this dual existence with quite the complexity of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831-1891), better known to the literary world by his pen name Owen Meredith. Born into literary aristocracy and destined for diplomatic greatness, Lytton embodied the tensions and contradiction…

“The heart has no wrinkles.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing

In time

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
1831 1922
They overlapped for 52 years (1840–1891). When Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was born, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton was about 9. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was about 51 when Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton died.

On the map

About 67 km separate Petworth House, Sussex, England from London, England. Both have ground in England.

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

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt only

Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton only

From the biographies

imperial

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: petworth, newbuildings place, lady anne blunt, the bedouin tribes of the euphrates, a pilgrimage to nejd, crabbet park, arabian horse breeding, stonyhurst college. Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton: owen meredith, viceroy of india, clytemnestra, the wanderer, lucile, benjamin disraeli, delhi durbar, second afghan war.

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 Grief of Love
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
81%
Compare
Consolation
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
O fly not, Pleasure
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
78%
Compare
Consolation
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
He Has Fallen from the Height of His Love
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
78% heart, self
Compare
Consolation
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
On Her Vanity
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
75%
Compare
Consolation
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
On Her Vanity
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
74% woman
Compare
The Vampire
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
Love is Best
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
73%
Compare
Consolation
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.

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