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

Jean Toomer Jean Toomer

Poet B

Charles Williams Charles Williams
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 57% Blended 57%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer

26 December 1894 – 30 March 1967 (~73)
1 live poem · English

On December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C., Nathan Pinchback Toomer was born into a world of racial complexity that would profoundly shape his literary vision and personal identity. Known to history as Jean Toomer, this enigmatic figure would produce one of the most celebrated works of the Harlem Renaissance before retreating into relative obscurity, leaving behind a legacy as puzzling as it is profound. His life stor…

“Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Modernist Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Sorrow
Charles Williams

Charles Williams

20 September 1886 – 15 May 1945 (~59)
3 live poems · English

On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…

“It is easier often to forgive than to be forgiven; yet it is fatal to be willing to be forgiven by God and to be reluctant to be forgiven by men.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Joy

In time

Jean Toomer
Charles Williams
1886 1967
They overlapped for 52 years (1894–1945). When Jean Toomer was born, Charles Williams was about 8. Jean Toomer was about 51 when Charles Williams died.

On the map

About 5,899 km separate Washington, D.C., USA from Islington, London, England. 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

Jean Toomer: washington d.c., harlem renaissance, sparta, georgia, pinckback benton stewart pinchback, nina pinchback toomer, karenitha, cotton song, reapers. Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell.

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.

Karintha
Jean Toomer
63% world
Compare
Her Dark Eyes Sparkle
Charles Williams
Karintha
Jean Toomer
59% world
Compare
The Assumption
Charles Williams
Karintha
Jean Toomer
54% world
Compare
Reunion
Charles Williams

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Jean Toomer: Longing, Sensuality, Sorrow. Charles Williams: Tenderness, Longing, Joy.

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